Can you connect elastic search-ui to elasticsearch instead of app search?

Elastic Search
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I have a sample app I set up using elastic search-ui. It connects to elastic app-search and returns results from a single-engine. I need to have multiple indexes or engines. According to this thread you cannot query multiple engines in-app search.

I know elasticsearch allows multiple index queries. My question. Can search-ui connect to elasticsearch instead of app-search?

If not is there another recommended UI kit for elasticsearch?

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One thing I did find is that elastic's hosted app search seems to have a concept of meta-engines that is one possible way to solve the issue.

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Sorry for the super late response on this John - we definitely recommend using App Search's meta engines functionality to solve the particular use case described in your first post.

In answer to your other question,

Can search-ui connect to elasticsearch instead of app-search?

Search UI technically can connect to Elasticsearch. Check out our documentation here: GitHub - elastic/search-ui: Search UI. Libraries for the fast development of modern, engaging search experiences.

However, I do need to reiterate from the documentation that we do not recommended to make API calls directly to Elasticsearch from a browser, as noted in the elasticsearch-js client, and additionally that Search UI's primary focus is on App Search. While we support other use cases and have some basic examples, we won't necessarily have in-depth examples or debugging for them. Hope that all makes sense!

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While searching multiple indexes in Elasticsearch, these indexes can have completely different schemas. For example searching on index-* will return results from index-organizations and index-contacts both.

Meta engine uses unified schemas. So creating meta engines for completed unrelated data (Organizations and Contacts) will impacts relevance tuning.

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Thanks for the reply. I ended up using a custom react.js app with the elastic EUI library and a node.js proxy to connect to elasticsearch.

1 Like
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Right, you're totally right about that Sumit. For Meta Engines specifically, that's an intended functionality rather than a side effect - users can set unique custom weights, boosts, relevance tuning, and curations for meta engines.

Pinging @nickchow to speak more on that from the product side of things and to answer questions there.

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Thanks for the reply. I ended up using a custom react.js app with the elastic EUI library and a node.js proxy to connect to elasticsearch.

Fantastic, glad to hear that worked out for you! EUI is definitely one of my favorite UI libraries to work with (I'm slightly biased of course!) Also cool to hear node.js works well directly with Elasticsearch and separately glad to hear the calls are all server-side! :smiley:

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