Is there any way to implement autofill and autogenerate results feature in Elasticsearch

Elastic Stack Elasticsearch
1

Hi,

I'm trying to do a document search application using Elastic search(NEST client)[I'm indexing the word documents as an attachment as of now].
I would like to know if there is way to do an auto fill feature using ES.

Something like "As in when i type some text in search text box, it start returning results based on that few text. Similar to google."

TIA

2

You can use the suggest API or use edge ngrams based analyzers for that.

3

Hi David.
Thanks for the suggestion.
I was reading through Completion suggester (> https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/reference/current/search-suggesters-completion.html & https://www.elastic.co/blog/you-complete-me). While reading through, I got a doubt. While using this suggester, while indexing the document,do we have to give the output of the suggestion also? And also while working on attachments, how can I implement this suggester? TIA
TIA

4

Yeah. It probably won't work with attachments unless you do the text extraction on your side with Tika directly.

So you'd probably better use ngrams.

5

if I'm not wrong , ngrams are used for a different purpose.
for eg: lets say I'm indexing a word elastic, then it will index as e,el,ela,elas,elast,elasti, elastic. So when I try to search "el" it will give me this result. Isnt it?

But my purpose is to only suggest the as I type the keyword and on search button click, it should find as per the search query and the keyword. Can ngrams be used in this case also?

6

indeed. But once you get the 1st 10 more relevant documents, you can extract from their _source any field you want and display it to the user?
Or run an aggregation on a given non analyzed field and display that to the user?

7

Thanks david. But I'm already using "english" analyzer on the attachment's content field. So can this(ngram) be joined along with it? (like separate index analyzer and search analyzer).. I presume this one (the english analyzer is search analyzer in this case)

8

I think we support multi fields. So you could may be use that to index as well with ngrams.

I tried to do IIRC on scrutmydocs project but it was giving not so good results on the content field. Was making more sense on title.

9

thanks for the info david.. Yeah if im using ngrams i will be using it on title field where as english analyzer on the content field while search. does that make sense? am i thinking in the right direction?

10

Yes. But again (I think I already wrote that), using mapper attachments is not the ideal thing to do.

I definitely prefer:

  • Doing the extraction in my application with Tika, create the JSON document exactly as I want, apply analyzers, multifield, copy_to, whatever feature you want.

or

  • Wait for 5.0 and use ingest-attachment plugin.

mapper-attachments plugin will be removed in the future, probably in 5.1 or 6.0.
It's already marked as deprecated.

1 Like