How to get a previous page from elasticsearch using search_after?

[Evgeniy_Kosinsky]

We are trying to make fast pagination with search_after.
It is possible to move forward by search_after.
We are using next request:

{
    "size":5,
    "search_after": [1508827804000, "data#123"],
     "sort": [{
		"date": {
			"order": "desc"
		}
	}, {
		"_uid": {
			"order": "desc"
		}
	}]
}

But how to get previous page? Is it possible to make it only by Elasticsearch API?
Our solution: for getting pointer on previous page we build such query

Into ES 2.x we used this request

{
"index": "my_index",
"type": "data",
"body": {
	"size": 11,
	"query": {
		"bool": {
			"filter": {
				"bool": {
					"must": [{
						"range": {
							"date": {
								"gte": "2017-10-17T09:26:00"
							}
						}
					}, {
						"range": {
							"date": {
								"lte": "2017-10-24T09:26:00"
							}
						}
					}, {
						"bool": {
							"should": [{
								"bool": {
									"must": [{
										"term": {
											"date": "2017-10-24T06:50:03+0000"
										}
									}, {
										"range": {
											"_uid": {
												"gt": "data#59eee29b367df1860f335c32"
											}
										}
									}]
								}
							}, {
								"range": {
									"data": {
										"gt": "2017-10-24T06:50:03+0000"
									}
								}
							}]
						}
					}]
				}
			}
		}
	},
	"sort": [{
		"date": {
			"order": "asc"
		}
	}, {
		"cID": {
			"order": "asc"
		}
	}]
}

}
If we needed to move forward, we would change gt to lt and sort from asc to desc.
This request doesn't work into ES 5.x and higher.

[xeraa]

This query looks very complicated. Generally, you can use search_after but reverse the sort order to get the page before. See also a similar discussion on GitHub: https://github.com/elastic/elasticsearch/issues/24364