Elasticsearch completion - generating input list with analyzers

Question

I've had a look at this article: https://www.elastic.co/blog/you-complete-me However, it requires writing some logic in the client to create multiple "input". Is there a way to define an analyzer (maybe using shingle or ngram/edge-ngram) that will generate the multiple terms for input?

Here's what I tried (and it obviously doesn't work):

DELETE /products/
PUT /products/
{
    "settings": {
        "analysis": {
            "filter": {
                "autocomplete_filter": {
                    "type":"shingle",
                    "max_shingle_size":5,
                    "min_shingle_size":2
                }
            },
            "analyzer": {
                "autocomplete": {
                    "filter": [
                        "lowercase",
                        "autocomplete_filter"
                    ],
                    "tokenizer": "standard"
                }
            }
        }
    }, 
    "mappings": {
        "product": {
            "properties": {
                "name": {"type": "string"
                ,"copy_to": ["name_suggest"]
                }
                ,"name_suggest": {
                    "type": "completion",
                    "payloads": false,
                    "analyzer": "autocomplete"
                }
            }
        }
    }
}

PUT /products/product/1
{
    "name": "Apple iPhone 5"
}

PUT /products/product/2
{
    "name": "iPhone 4 16GB"
}

PUT /products/product/3
{
    "name": "iPhone 3 GS 16GB black"
}

PUT /products/product/4
{
    "name": "Apple iPhone 4 S 16 GB white"
}

PUT /products/product/5
{
    "name": "Apple iPhone case"
}

POST /products/_suggest
{
    "suggestions": {
        "text":"i"
        ,"completion":{
            "field": "name_suggest"
        }
    }
}

Answer 1

Don't think there's a direct way to achieve this. I'm not sure why it would be needed to store ngrammed tokens considering elasticsearch already stores the 'input' text as an FST structure. New releases also allow for fuzziness in the suggest query. https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/reference/current/search-suggesters-completion.html#fuzzy

I can understand the need for something like a shingle analyser to generate the inputs for you, but there doesn't seem to be a way yet. Having said that, the _analyze endpoint can be used to generate tokens from the analyzer of your choice and those tokens can be passed to the 'input' field (with or without any other added logic). This way you won't have to replicate your analyzer logic in your application code. That's the only way i can think of to achieve the desired input field.

Hope it helps.