How to search nested objects with elastic-search

Question

OK, I've not been able to figure this out thus far. Hoping someone can offer some insight.

Given the documents below, how would I search for all documents with a video that has "test" in the video title? I'm using the HTTP API. (Basically, how do you search nested objects with elastic search? I know there has to be docs out there, but I haven't really been able to find any.)

[{
    id:4635,
    description:"This is a test description",
    author:"John",
    author_id:51421,
    video: {
        title:"This is a test title for a video",
        description:"This is my video description",
        url:"/url_of_video"
    }
},
{
    id:4636,
    description:"This is a test description 2",
    author:"John",
    author_id:51421,
    video: {
        title:"This is an example title for a video",
        description:"This is my video description2",
        url:"/url_of_video2"
    }
},
{
    id:4637,
    description:"This is a test description3",
    author:"John",
    author_id:51421,
    video: {
        title:"This is a test title for a video3",
        description:"This is my video description3",
        url:"/url_of_video3"
    }
}]

Answer 1

You don't necessarily need to nest video; you can map it as a normal field. Which means it will store

'video:title': "This is a test title for a video3",
'video:description':"This is my video description3",
'video:url':"/url_of_video3"

And you can search for video.title:'test'.

As far as I get it, nested fields are useful when you have multiple nested items, and you want to make a query only for the nested items. For example, having this data

[{
    id:4635,
    description:"This is a test description",
    author:"John",
    author_id:51421,
    video: [
      {
        title:"This is a test title for a video",
        description:"This is my video description",
        url:"/url_of_video"
      },
      {
        title:"This is an example title for a video",
        description:"This is my video description2",
        url:"/url_of_video2"
      }
    ]
},
{
    id:4637,
    description:"This is a test description3",
    author:"John",
    author_id:51421,
    video: [
      {
        title:"This is a test title for a video3",
        description:"This is my video description3",
        url:"/url_of_video3"
      }
    ]
}]

If you would search for video.title: 'test' and video.description: 'description2', and video was not nested, it will give you a fake result (because test is in the first video and description2 in the second, but in all the video field you have both).

In this case, if you map video as nested, it will remember each video as a separate entity and will search for individual videos that fit those conditions, so for video.title: 'test' and video.description: 'description2' it will return nothing, for video.title: 'example' and video.description: 'description2' it will return one result.