Elasticsearch array property must contain given array items

Question

I have documents that look like:

{
    "tags" => [
        "tag1",
        "tag2",
    ],
    "name" => "Example 1"
}

{
    "tags" => [
        "tag1",
        "tag3",
        "tag4"
    ],
    "name" => "Example 2"
}

What I now want is to do a terms search where given array might look like:

[tag1, tag3]

where expected hit should be:

{
    "tags" => [
        "tag1",
        "tag3",
        "tag4"
    ],
    "name" => "Example 2"
}

However, when I do a query like:

GET _search
{
    "query": {
        "filtered": {
           "query": {
               "match_all": {}
           },
           "filter": {
               "bool": {
                   "must": [
                      {
                          "terms": {
                             "tags": [
                                "tag1",
                                "tag3"
                             ]
                          }
                      }
                   ]
               }
           }
       }
    }
}

I get both "Example 1" and "Example 2" as hits since both Example 1 and Example 2 contains either tag1 or tag3. By looking at the documentation for terms I figured out that terms is actually a contains query.

How can I in this case make sure that Example 2 is the only hit when querying with tag1 and tag3?

Answer 1

For those who are looking at this in 2020, you might have noticed that minimum_should_match is deprecated long back.

There is an alternative currently available, which is to use terms_set.

For eg:

{
  "query": {
    "terms_set": {
      "programming_languages": {
        "terms": [ "c++", "java", "php" ],
        "minimum_should_match_field": "required_matches"
      }
    }
  }
}

The above example assumes a field required_matches exists which contains an integer, that defines how many matches should be there.

What is more useful is the alternative field minimum_should_match_script.

See the example below:

{
  "query": {
    "terms_set": {
      "programming_languages": {
        "terms": [ "c++", "java", "php" ],
        "minimum_should_match_script": {
          "source": "2"
        },
      }
    }
  }
}

You can always use the inside a filter context to make it works a filter.

Read more here