Elasticsearch and timezones

Question

I have an index with a time field whose values are like:

time: 2012-06-02T12:25:27+02:00

Then I'm running the following query:

{
  "sort": {
    "time": "desc"
  },
  "query": {
    "query_string": {
      "query": "time:[2012-6-2T12:24:00Z TO 2012-6-2T12:26:00Z]",
      "default_operator": "AND"
    }
  },
  "size": 30
}

That is returning 0 hits, but if I shift the query string by 2 hours then it matches with the records in that time. So, I'm pretty sure this is a time zone problem. Reading the docs I found I can put a "time_zone" : 2 in the query, but.... where should it be placed in the previous query? I tried many options but couldn't make it work.

Answer 1

You, probably, have seen the "time_zone" parameter in the histogram date facet, which is different from this query. The query_string query doesn't accept a time_zone parameter. I think the simplest solution here would be replacing "Z" with desired time zone in your query:

{
  "sort": {
    "time": "desc"
  },
  "query": {
    "query_string": {
      "query": "time:[2012-6-2T12:24:00+02:00 TO 2012-6-2T12:26:00+02:00]",
      "default_operator": "AND"
    }
  },
  "size": 30
}