Elastic search edge_ngram match query on _all being ignored - elasticsearch

Question

I'm using elastic search number: "1.5.2" and I'm trying to implement an edge_ngram autocomplete search. I have the following mapping:
curl -XPUT 'localhost:8080/users' -d '{
"settings": {
"analysis": {
"filter": {
"edge_ngram_filter": {
"type": "edge_ngram",
"min_gram": 2,
"max_gram": 10
}
},
"analyzer": {
"edge_ngram_analyzer": {
"type": "custom",
"tokenizer": "standard",
"filter": [
"lowercase",
"asciifolding",
"edge_ngram_filter"
]
},
"whitespace_analyzer": {
"type": "custom",
"tokenizer": "whitespace",
"filter": [
"lowercase",
"asciifolding"
]
}
}
},
"mappings": {
"user": {
"_all": {
"type":"string",
"index_analyzer": "edge_ngram_analyzer",
"search_analyzer": "whitespace_analyzer"
},
"properties": {
"id":{
"type": "integer",
"index": "no",
"include_in_all":false
},
"email": {
"type": "string"
},
"firstName": {
"type": "string"
},
"lastName": {
"type": "string"
}
}
}
}
}
}'
I then index an "user" document:
curl -XPUT 'localhost:8080/users/user/1' -d '{
"email": "a.smith#gmail.com",
"firstName": "Alexander",
"lastName": "Smith"
}'
When I run the following query nothing is returned:
curl -XGET 'localhost:8080/users/_search' -d '{
"query": {
"match":{
"_all":{
"query": "ale",
"operator":"and"
}
}
}
}'
Why is the _all match query not matching on the user document?

Answer 1

You can achieve the functionality of autocomplete by edge_ngram without overriding the _all field analysis. This is done by changing the names of the analyzers you have defined to default_index and default_search (you can alias them to reflect your original names ("edge_ngram_analyzer" and "whitespace_analyzer") if you want). Here is your configuration with the relevant changes:
curl -XPUT 'localhost:8080/users' -d '{
"settings": {
"analysis": {
"filter": {
"edge_ngram_filter": {
"type": "edge_ngram",
"min_gram": 2,
"max_gram": 10
}
},
"analyzer": {
"default_index": {
"type": "custom",
"tokenizer": "standard",
"filter": [
"lowercase",
"asciifolding",
"edge_ngram_filter"
]
},
"default_search": {
"type": "custom",
"tokenizer": "whitespace",
"filter": [
"lowercase",
"asciifolding"
]
}
}
},
"mappings": {
"user": {
"properties": {
"id":{
"type": "integer",
"index": "no",
"include_in_all":false
},
"email": {
"type": "string"
},
"firstName": {
"type": "string"
},
"lastName": {
"type": "string"
}
}
}
}
}
}'
Hope I have managed to help :)