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Elastic Docs ›Elasticsearch Guide [5.3] ›Search APIs

Request Body Search

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Request Body Search

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The search request can be executed with a search DSL, which includes the Query DSL, within its body. Here is an example:

GET /twitter/tweet/_search
{
    "query" : {
        "term" : { "user" : "kimchy" }
    }
}

And here is a sample response:

{
    "took": 1,
    "timed_out": false,
    "_shards":{
        "total" : 1,
        "successful" : 1,
        "failed" : 0
    },
    "hits":{
        "total" : 1,
        "max_score": 1.3862944,
        "hits" : [
            {
                "_index" : "twitter",
                "_type" : "tweet",
                "_id" : "0",
                "_score": 1.3862944,
                "_source" : {
                    "user" : "kimchy",
                    "message": "trying out Elasticsearch",
                    "date" : "2009-11-15T14:12:12",
                    "likes" : 0
                }
            }
        ]
    }
}

Parameters

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timeout

A search timeout, bounding the search request to be executed within the specified time value and bail with the hits accumulated up to that point when expired. Defaults to no timeout. See Time units.

from

To retrieve hits from a certain offset. Defaults to 0.

size

The number of hits to return. Defaults to 10. If you do not care about getting some hits back but only about the number of matches and/or aggregations, setting the value to 0 will help performance.

search_type

The type of the search operation to perform. Can be dfs_query_then_fetch or query_then_fetch. Defaults to query_then_fetch. See Search Type for more.

request_cache

Set to true or false to enable or disable the caching of search results for requests where size is 0, ie aggregations and suggestions (no top hits returned). See Shard request cache.

terminate_after

The maximum number of documents to collect for each shard, upon reaching which the query execution will terminate early. If set, the response will have a boolean field terminated_early to indicate whether the query execution has actually terminated_early. Defaults to no terminate_after.

Out of the above, the search_type and the request_cache must be passed as query-string parameters. The rest of the search request should be passed within the body itself. The body content can also be passed as a REST parameter named source.

Both HTTP GET and HTTP POST can be used to execute search with body. Since not all clients support GET with body, POST is allowed as well.

Fast check for any matching docs

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In case we only want to know if there are any documents matching a specific query, we can set the size to 0 to indicate that we are not interested in the search results. Also we can set terminate_after to 1 to indicate that the query execution can be terminated whenever the first matching document was found (per shard).

GET /_search?q=message:elasticsearch&size=0&terminate_after=1

The response will not contain any hits as the size was set to 0. The hits.total will be either equal to 0, indicating that there were no matching documents, or greater than 0 meaning that there were at least as many documents matching the query when it was early terminated. Also if the query was terminated early, the terminated_early flag will be set to true in the response.

{
  "took": 3,
  "timed_out": false,
  "terminated_early": true,
  "_shards": {
    "total": 1,
    "successful": 1,
    "failed": 0
  },
  "hits": {
    "total": 1,
    "max_score": 0.0,
    "hits": []
  }
}
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