Haystack boosting based on specific value in specific field - elasticsearch

Question

I am using Haystack with ElasticSearch and I would like to perform boosts that don't just boost a term in general, but instead boost a term only when it is found on a specific field.
For instance, on my UserIndex, I would like to prioritize (boost) search results where the user is marked as active. is_active is a BooleanField on the index model. I know how to filter so that I only fetch active users, but how can I boost active users but not outright filter out inactive users? I could apply a boost to the field in UserIndex, but that doesn't seem like it would work without some way other than an outright filter to search against that BooleanField (since otherwise there are no search terms that the field boost would affect). I could apply a boost to the SearchQuerySet, but the boost() function takes a string which appears to just be a straight-up search term, and you cannot specify a field for that term to occur in.
I might be able to solve that issue in isolation with order_by, but I have a bunch of other complex boosts I want to do:
I want to be able to boost matching users if they have IDs in a list specified by the application at runtime (this is so I can boost users relative to the context of the page where the search button was pressed). I could simply boost a search term containing the user's ID, but then if that number was coincidentally in another field, it would boost that field too and thus give very strange results.
I want to be able to boost the searching user's friends. I currently have the list of every user's friends in a MultiValueField on the search index model. I want to pass the searching user's ID in with the search query, and boost any users in the index who have the searching user's ID in their friends list. Again, I have the same problem as above -- I can boost the ID, but I can't specify that I only want to boost the occurrence of that ID in that specific field.
I have a second BooleanField I want to boost by, similar to is_active but boosted by a smaller amount.
All of this is easy-ish if I can boost by a combination of a term and a field, but it seems very hard if I can only boost a term and not a field.
The only thing I have been able to think of so far is basically a hack: instead of BooleanFields, use CharFields with magic strings in them. Then boost those magic strings as search terms, and count on nobody accidentally using the magic strings in their inputted text. Likewise, instead of raw ids in my MultiValueFields, use ids prepended with magic strings. This is awkward, fragile and potentially buggy given that the behavior of the ElasticSearch standard tokenizer may be unpredictable given nonsensical "magic strings".
Another option I considered was using a Raw input type and adding ElasticSearch-specific syntax, but usage of Raw with ElasticSearch is almost entirely undocumented and the ElasticSearch boosting documentation itself is very thin.
Is there any way to solve this that does not involve mangling my index data in such a fashion?

Answer 1

In your mapping you could add:
"is_active":{
"type":"boolean",
"boost":10.0
}
and
"friends":{
"type":"int",
"index":"not_analyzed",
"boost":5.0
}
And then wrap your original query in a boolean query with a MUST on your original query and a SHOULD on is_active:true and SHOULD on friends:1234