Highlight the hit on a large index doing _all query

[sharongur (sharon)]

I need to deliver a POC very fast, because of that i decided to just throw all my information into 1 index.

Now, when i search, for example, a number with a _all query, i get a very large document.

Is there a way for elastic to highlight on which field the matching occurred?

I look into these docs, doc1doc2

But these solutions only highlights a certain field. in my query i use _all, i dont know which field will hit

Is splitting my index into several indexes \ several types on the same index the only solution?

[polyfractal (Zachary Tong)]

The short answer is "no", you can't do that with the _all field. The _all field is really that: a single field that contains the concatenated contents of all other fields. Once the data from other fields is concatenated into _all, all information about where it came (or even what kind of data it is, e.g. date vs. number vs. string) is completely lost. It's just a single, big bag of text.

If you need to know what field a query matches, you'll need to maintain multiple fields and search across them. You can do that relatively easily with the multi_match query, which is designed to search many fields at once.

Then you can use highlighting or query naming in various combinations to achieve what you want.

@sharongur

Is splitting my index into several indexes \ several types on the same index the only solution?

This probably isn't required, you just need to keep the fields distinct and search them as independent fields, rather than using the _all field.