Can ES support to add a new item into the nested objects of existing document?

Elastic Stack Elasticsearch
1

Hi all,

I have a ES document like:

{
  "title": "Nest eggs",
  "comments": [ 
    {
      "name":    "John Smith",
      "comment": "Great article",
    },
    {
      "name":    "Alice White",
      "comment": "More like this please",
    }
  ]
}

and now I'd like to add a new "comments" in this document and finially the document will be:

{
  "title": "Nest eggs",
  "comments": [ 
    {
      "name":    "John Smith",
      "comment": "Great article",
    },
    {
      "name":    "Alice White",
      "comment": "More like this please",
    },
	{
      "name":    "New guy",
      "comment": "something here",
    }
  ]
}

Does someone know how to do it?

Thanks a lot

1 Like
2

Any one knows it?

3

You can update the comments array, but you would have to send an array with the two comments that already exist plus the new comment.

https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/guide/current/partial-updates.html

4

Thanks, Dan. It should have a more smart way :smile:

5

I know probably this is not the solution you are looking for. But it might help you!

You can try parent child relationship instead of nested object: https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/guide/current/parent-child.html

It will allow you to add/update/delete child in each parent. But you have to put them all in the same shard!

Cheers, Ramy

6

Thanks, Ramy! It looks quite nice for adding/updating/delete.
But seems it hard to got parent and child docment in same query.

Still, appreciate your suggestion.

Cheers, Gin

7

Hi Gin,
What do you mean with it?

You are able to query parents by their children and on the opposite way as well!

8

You can use the inner hits functionality to get the child documents in the same query when you use the has_child query.

The parent/child approach will allow you to index a child document individually which is more efficient if you have large documents and a requirement to update frequently. However, parent/child queries are 5-10 times slower than nested queries. So it is worth keeping that in mind when deciding what is the best approach for your use case.

9

Ramy and Dan,

Thanks for your suggestion and those help a lot :smile:

BR. Gin