# Parent/Child Relationship & Routing a Document HEAD request

**URL:** https://discuss.elastic.co/t/parent-child-relationship-routing-a-document-head-request/59135
**Category:** Elasticsearch
**Created:** [August 28, 2016, 11:54pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/parent-child-relationship-routing-a-document-head-request/59135 "2016-08-28T23:54:36Z")
**Posts on this page:** 3
**Page:** 1

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### Author: ![Andrew\_Luitink](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/58f4c7/32.png) [@Andrew\_Luitink](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/Andrew_Luitink)
#### Post date: [August 28, 2016, 11:54pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/parent-child-relationship-routing-a-document-head-request/59135/1 "2016-08-28T23:54:37Z")

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I recently added a Parent/Child relationship to some of my types to allow me to add a layer of security implied by the search parameters.

Routing became an issue when I noticed that checking for the existence of a document requires the parent parameter if the type has a parent/child relationship.

This makes sense but at the same time is ridiculous IMO.

I have an ID, I'd like to check if a document exists by that ID, I understand shard routing, but is there anyway to get around having to know the parent ID in order to check the existence of a child?

I can perform an Id centric search and get the result without issue.

What am I missing, this is driving me crazy!?! 🙂

Thanks!

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### Author: ![Andrew\_Luitink](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/58f4c7/32.png) [@Andrew\_Luitink](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/Andrew_Luitink)
#### Post date: [August 30, 2016, 10:06pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/parent-child-relationship-routing-a-document-head-request/59135/2 "2016-08-30T22:06:26Z")

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For those interested, it would appear this is not a capability of ES at this time. If you do not know the parentId value you must perform a search for the objects.

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### Author: ![system](https://us1.discourse-cdn.com/elastic/original/3X/1/a/1ac57faf039f6b580b3f104ef42a2a89e41014de.png) [@system](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/system)
#### Post date: [July 5, 2017, 10:23pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/parent-child-relationship-routing-a-document-head-request/59135/3 "2017-07-05T22:23:50Z")

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