Setting Time To Live (TTL) from Java - sample requested - elasticsearch

Question

EDIT:
This is basically what I want to do, only in Java
Using ElasticSearch, we add documents to an index bypassing IndexRequest items to a BulkRequestBuilder.
I would like for the documents to be dropped from the index after some time has passed (time to live/ttl)
This can be done either by setting a default for the index, or on a per-document basis. Either approach is fine by me.
The code below is an attempt to do it per document. It does not work. I think it's because TTL is not enabled for the index. Either show me what Java code I need to add to enable TTL so the code below works, or show me different code that enables TTL + sets default TTL value for the index in Java I know how to do it from the REST API but I need to do it from Java code, if at all possible.
logger.debug("Indexing record ({}): {}", id, map);
final IndexRequest indexRequest = new IndexRequest(_indexName, _documentType, id);
final long debug = indexRequest.ttl();
if (_ttl > 0) {
indexRequest.ttl(_ttl);
System.out.println("Setting TTL to " + _ttl);
System.out.println("IndexRequest now has ttl of " + indexRequest.ttl());
}
indexRequest.source(map);
indexRequest.operationThreaded(false);
bulkRequestBuilder.add(indexRequest);
}
// execute and block until done.
BulkResponse response;
try {
response = bulkRequestBuilder.execute().actionGet();
Later I check in my unit test by polling this method, but the document count never goes down.
public long getDocumentCount() throws Exception {
Client client = getClient();
try {
client.admin().indices().refresh(new RefreshRequest(INDEX_NAME)).actionGet();
ActionFuture<CountResponse> response = client.count(new CountRequest(INDEX_NAME).types(DOCUMENT_TYPE));
CountResponse countResponse = response.get();
return countResponse.getCount();
} finally {
client.close();
}
}

Answer 1

After a LONG day of googling and writing test programs, I came up with a working example of how to use ttl and basic index/object creation from the Java API. Frankly most of the examples in the docs are trivial, and some JavaDoc and end-to-end examples would go a LONG way to help those of us who are using the non-REST interfaces.
Ah well.
Code here: Adding mapping to a type from Java - how do I do it?