Limit query results while paginating them

[ovinz (vinz)]

Hello, I'd like to limit my query results to the first 500 documents and use the pagination (for instance from=0&size=30).

My use case :

• I want to hide the total of documents
• I don't use yet any relevancy aggs (scoring )
• The results are handle by an API (api-platform with a Paginator).

I thought terminate_after did the trick but it's not the right to do that apparently. I have some wrong results when I sort.

Do you have an advice to handle that ?
Do I have to do it with a size of 500 doc and handle the pagination in my app (php in my case) ?

Thanks

[spinscale (Alexander Reelsen)]

Hey,

can you maybe explain what did not work as expected with using from/size even without terminate after? What did not work as expected, and what did you expect?

--Alex

[ovinz (vinz)]

Hi Alexander,

Thanks for your help

Using from/size feature allows me to divid results into small parts (30 documents in my case) but I'm not able, in the same time, to limit the whole query to a number (ie : 500).
My query looks like this :

"sort": [
  {
	"createdAt": {
		"order": "desc"
	}
}],
"query": {
	"..."
},
"size": 30,
"from": 0

[spinscale (Alexander Reelsen)]

I am not sure I understand.

What do you think you gain when limiting the query to 500? Speed? You still need to sort every hit properly by the sort criteria.

BUT: I'd highly encourage you to upgrade to Elasticsearch 7.6.0, as there is a huge speed up optimization when sorting by dates and numbers. See the release blog post at https://www.elastic.co/blog/elasticsearch-7-6-0-released

[ovinz (vinz)]

Yes I'll do the upgrade

I'm not looking for performance at all but handle pagination with one query.
In a natural form, I would have said
"can you give me the first 500 results that match these criteria by cutting them out from 0 to 29 then from 30 to 60"...

But I must thinking wrong way.
I should rather use a size of 500 and then slice the results within my php application

[spinscale (Alexander Reelsen)]

I do not understand, why you are not using from/size parameters for this.

from: 0, size: 30
from: 30, size: 30
from: 60, size: 30
...
from: 480, size: 20

in order to retrieve 500 results.

Why does that not work for you? What did I miss in your question?

--Alex