How to add subdocument to an ElasticSearch index - elasticsearch

Question

In ElasticSearch, given the following document, Is it possible to add items to the "Lists" sub-document without passing the parent attributes (i.e. Message and tags)?
I have several attributes in the parent document which I dont want to pass every time I want to add one item to the sub-document.
{
"tweet" : {
"message" : "some arrays in this tweet...",
"tags" : ["elasticsearch", "wow"],
"lists" : [
{
"name" : "prog_list",
"description" : "programming list"
},
{
"name" : "cool_list",
"description" : "cool stuff list"
}
]
}
}

Answer 1

What you are looking for is, how to insert a nested documents.
In your case, you can use the Update API to append a nested document to your list.
curl -XPOST localhost:9200/index/tweets/1/_update -d '{
"script" : "ctx._source.tweet.lists += new_list",
"params" : {
"new_list" : {"name": "fun_list", "description": "funny list" }
}
}'
To support nested documents, you have to define your mapping, which is described here.
Assuming your type is tweets, the follwoing mapping should work:
curl -XDELETE http://localhost:9200/index
curl -XPUT http://localhost:9200/index -d'
{
"settings": {
"index.number_of_shards": 1,
"index.number_of_replicas": 0
},
"mappings": {
"tweets": {
"properties": {
"tweet": {
"properties": {
"lists": {
"type": "nested",
"properties": {
"name": {
"type": "string"
},
"description": {
"type": "string"
}
}
}
}
}
}
}
}
}'
Then add a first entry:
curl -XPOST http://localhost:9200/index/tweets/1 -d '
{
"tweet": {
"message": "some arrays in this tweet...",
"tags": [
"elasticsearch",
"wow"
],
"lists": [
{
"name": "prog_list",
"description": "programming list"
},
{
"name": "cool_list",
"description": "cool stuff list"
}
]
}
}'
And then add your element with:
curl -XPOST http://localhost:9200/index/tweets/1/_update -d '
{
"script": "ctx._source.tweet.lists += new_list",
"params": {
"new_list": {
"name": "fun_list",
"description": "funny list"
}
}
}'