Displaying documents in result multiple times with sorting

[pszegvari]

Let's say that a nested document about a person can store data of type birthData, deathData, etc. We want to get ES documents sorted by [MONTH-DAY DESC], [YEAR ASC].

Filtering and sorting by a single event type is a piece of cake, but what if I want to sort by multiple event dates and display a document as many times as there are dates inside? As we have several millions of docs, and multiple event types, result manipulaton on application server would be a no-go

Short example:

{
        "id": "ID1",
        "fullName": "John Smith",
        "eventsData": [
          {
            "event_data_type": "BD",
            "event_date": "1971-12-30T00:00:00Z",
          },
          {
            "event_data_type": "DD",
            "event_date": "2013-02-11T00:00:00Z",
          }
        ]
    },
    {
        "id": "ID2",
        "fullName": "Jake Smith",
        "eventsData": [
          {
            "event_data_type": "BD",
            "event_date": "1965-02-02T00:00:00Z",
          },
          {
            "event_data_type": "DD",
            "event_date": "2011-12-30T00:00:00Z",
          }
        ]
    }

The printed results with relevant data would be:

   ID1, BD, 1971-12-30
   ID2, DD, 2011-12-30
   ID1, DD, 2013-02-11
   ID2, BD, 1965-02-02

So if a document has n events, then it is displayed n times.

Can you offer any elastic search solution for this problem? What feature should we use?

[s1monw (Simon Willnauer)]

you have to index each event as an individual document to make that happen IMO