Mixing/Alternating Query Results

[David_Klebanoff]

Suppose you had documents that fall into distinct categories: A, B, C, D, E, and F. Is it possible to make a query, such that the results are sorted in such a way that they are mixed/alternated evenly across these categories. For example, suppose your query had a boolean filter selecting a subset of the categories:

{
    "size" : 10,
    "query" {
        "bool" : {
            "must" :   [
              { "term" : {"title" : "foo"}}
            ]
            "should" :   [
              { "term" : {"category" : "A"}},
              { "term" : {"category" : "B"}},
              { "term" : {"category" : "C"}}
            ]
        }
    }
}

Is it possible to generate results that look like:

A,A,B,B,C,C,A,A,B,B

[Igor_Motov]

You can use Multi Search to perform 3 separate searches (one in each category) and then interlace the results on your application side before displaying them to the user.

[David_Klebanoff]

Thanks for the suggestion Igor. It certainly beats having the network overhead of X individual searches, which is nice, but it still isn't quite what I'm looking for. Scaling issues aside, the multi search results wouldn't paginate properly as well. A deal breaker for my intended use case.

Still looking for a solution should one exist.