Exists query with highlighting

[Jogi_Michal (Jogi Michał)]

Is there a possibility to use elastic search exists query with highlights?

What I need achieve is to find all documents with some field and I'm using the exists query for this (it works fine) but additionally, I want to have this field to be highlighted.

How can I do this? It seems that highlighting for the exists query is not supported. Is there even a sense of using highlights with exists query?

Thanks in advance.

[spinscale (Alexander Reelsen)]

can you maybe explain with the help of an example, what exactly you would like to have highlighted if you search for the existence of a field? Side note: you can have a dedicated highlight_query in the highlight section, that could help you as well here, but depends on your use-case.

[Jogi_Michal (Jogi Michał)]

The query is quite complicated. I'm searching for fields which has value in field content.obj_list.hash.value - and this works fine. But I want to have this whole field to be highlighted.

The response should give me all documents that have field content.obj_list.hash.value filled and highlight should give me this whole field to be highlighted - the same as for regexp query .* on this field.

I want to avoid using regexp because it's not optimal (I have a very big query and load on ES instance is very big).

Summarising: I want to have a field to be highlighted as for regexp .* with the exists query but without using regexp in extra highlight_query...

    {
         'from': 0,
         'query': {
             'bool': {
                 'should': [
                     {
                         'nested': {
                             'inner_hits': {
                                 'highlight': {
                                     'fields': {
                                         'content.obj_list.hash.value': {
                                             'fragment_size': 200
                                         }
                                     },
                                     'order': 'score',
                                     'type': 'plain'
                                 }
                             },
                             'path': 'content.obj_list',
                             'query': {
                                 'bool': {
                                     'should': [
                                         {
                                             'bool': {
                                                 'minimum_should_match': 1,
                                                 'should': [
                                                     {
                                                         'exists': {
                                                             'field': 'content.obj_list.hash.value'
                                                         }
                                                     }
                                                 ]
                                             }
                                         }
                                     ]
                                 }
                             },
                             'score_mode': 'max'
                         }
                     },
                 ]
             }
         },
         'size': 10,
         'sort': ['_score'],
         'timeout': '10s'
        }

[spinscale (Alexander Reelsen)]

Hey,

from an application perspective (and especially from my ES perspective) it sounds easier as if you just highlight manually, by extracting the field from the inner_hits array? I might be missing something though, which could be easier to see with a fully fledged example.

--Alex