Text Query

A family of text queries that accept text, analyzes it, and constructs a query out of it. For example:

{
    "text" : {
        "message" : "this is a test"
    }
}

Note, even though the name is text, it also supports exact matching (term like) on numeric values and dates.

Types of Text Queries

boolean

The default text query is of type boolean. It means that the text provided is analyzed and the analysis process constructs a boolean query from the provided text. The operator flag can be set to or or and to control the boolean clauses (defaults to or).

The analyzer can be set to control which analyzer will perform the analysis process on the text. It default to the field explicit mapping definition, or the default search analyzer.

fuzziness can be set to a value (depending on the relevant type, for string types it should be a value between 0.0 and 1.0) to constructs fuzzy queries for each term analyzed. The prefix_length and max_expansions can be set in this case to control the fuzzy process.

Here is an example when providing additional parameters (note the slight change in structure, message is the field name):

{
    "text" : {
        "message" : {
            "query" : "this is a test",
            "operator" : "and"
        }
    }
}

phrase

The text_phrase query analyzes the text and creates a phrase query out of the analyzed text. For example:

{
    "text_phrase" : {
        "message" : "this is a test"
    }
}

Since text_phrase is only a type of a text query, it can also be used in the following manner:

{
    "text" : {
        "message" : {
            "query" : "this is a test",
            "type" : "phrase"
        }
    }
}

A phrase query maintains order of the terms up to a configurable slop (which defaults to 0).

The analyzer can be set to control which analyzer will perform the analysis process on the text. It default to the field explicit mapping definition, or the default search analyzer, for example:

{
    "text_phrase" : {
        "message" : {
            "query" : "this is a test",
            "analyzer" : "my_analyzer"
        }
    }
}

text_phrase_prefix

The text_phrase_prefix is the same as text_phrase, expect it allows for prefix matches on the last term in the text. For example:

{
    "text_phrase_prefix" : {
        "message" : "this is a test"
    }
}

Or:

{
    "text" : {
        "message" : {
            "query" : "this is a test",
            "type" : "phrase_prefix"
        }
    }
}

It accepts the same parameters as the phrase type. In addition, it also accepts a max_expansions parameter that can control to how many prefixes the last term will be expanded. It is highly recommended to set it to an acceptable value to control the execution time of the query. For example:

{
    "text_phrase_prefix" : {
        "message" : {
            "query" : "this is a test",
            "max_expansions" : 10
        }
    }
}

Comparison to query_string / field

The text family of queries does not go through a “query parsing” process. It does not support field name prefixes, wildcard characters, or other “advance” features. For this reason, chances of it failing are very small / non existent, and it provides an excellent behavior when it comes to just analyze and run that text as a query behavior (which is usually what a text search box does). Also, the phrase_prefix can provide a great “as you type” behavior to automatically load search results.