How to use elastic search for advanced queries: - elasticsearch

Question

I'm using elasticsearch. I'm already pretty deep into it but I'm very confused as to how to go about writing advanced queries. There are queries / filters / etc. I'm confused as to how to proceed.
I have a schema that looks like this:
photos: {people: [{person_id: 1, person_name:"john kealy"}],
tags: [{tag_id: 1, tag_name:"other tag"},
by_line: "John D Kealy/My website.com",
location: "Some Place OUt West"]
I need to be able to string together these queries dynamically ALWAYS pulling in FULL MATCHES, e.g. I would like to search for
people.person_id: [1,2] (pulls in only photos with BOTH or more peole)
tags.tag_id: [1,2,3] (pulls in only photos with all three or more tags)
by_line: "John D. Kealy/My Website.com" (the full name including the slash)
location: "some place out west"
I would like to write one query with all these items. I need to include the slash in "by_line", i don't care up upper or lower case. I need the exact match "some place out west". What do I use here? Queries or filters / filtered?

Answer 1

General guidelines for bool filters/queries can be found here.
If you are constructing an "exact match" query, you can often use the term filter (or query).
If you are constructing a search that requires a solid performance speed wise, a filtered query is often advisable, as filters are set before the query is run, often improving performance.
As for your specific example, the below filters should work, throw it around a matchAll query or anything else you need [With the non-analyzed by_line field, the analyzed one has a query). This should give you an idea as how to construct future queries:
NOTE: This assumes that your by_line field is not analyzed. The double slash will escape your slash delimiter, if you are using an analyzed field you must use a match query.
Without analyzer on by_line
{
"query" : {
"filtered" : {
"filter" : {
"bool" : {
"must" : [
{ "terms" : {"people.person_id" : ["1", "2"]}},
{ "terms" : {"tags.tag_id" : ["1", "2", "3"]}},
{ "term" : {"by_line" : "John D. Kealy\\/My Website.com"}},
{ "term" : {"location" : "some place out west"}}
]
}
}
}
}
}
I will keep the above there for future readers, however I see in your post history that you are using the standard analyzer, your query should be structured as follows.
With analyzer on by_line
{
"query" : {
"filtered" : {
"query": {
"match": {
"by_line": "John Kealy/BFA.com"
}
},
"filter" : {
"bool" : {
"must" : [
{ "terms" : {"people.person_id" : ["1", "2"]}},
{ "terms" : {"tags.tag_id" : ["1", "2", "3"]}},
{ "term" : {"location" : "some place out west"}}
]
}
}
}
}
}