Elasticsearch get matching documents after specific document id

Question

When I search for documents I took the first 10 and give them to the view, if the user scrolls to the end of the list the next 10 elements should be displayed.

I know the last document id of the displayed documents, now I have to get the next 10. Basically I would perform the exact same search with an offset of 10 but it would be much better to be able to search with the same query, putting the document id of the last retrieved document to it and retrieve the matching documents after the document with that id.

Is that possible with elasticsearch?

=== UPDATE

I want to point out my issue a bit more, because it seems it is not clear enough as it is described right now. Sorry for that.

The case:

You have a kind of feed, the feed will grow every second. If a user goes to the feed he gets the most recent 10 entries, if he scrolls down he wants to get the next 10 entries.

Because the feed is growing every second, a usual offset / limit (from / size in elasticsearch) can't solve this problem, you would display already displayed entries or completely newer entries, depending on the time between first request (first 10 entries) and the request for the next entries.

The request to get the next 10 elements AFTER the already displayed entries gives the backend the id of the last entry which got displayed. The backend knows to ignore all entries before this specific one.

At the moment I'm handling this in code, I request the list with all matching entries from Elasticsearch and iterate it, this way I can do everything I want (no surprise) and extract the needed chunk of entires.

My question is: Is there is a build in solution for this issue in elasticsearch. Because solving the problem on my way is not the fastest.

Answer 1

You just have to create your query DSL and a pagination system with

{ "size": 10, "from" : YOUR_OFFSET }

Answer 2

It's an old topic, but it feels that Search After API, which is available since elasticsearch 5.0, does exactly what is needed. Provide an id of your last doc and it's timestamp, for example:

GET twitter/tweet/_search
{
  "size": 10,
  "query": {
    "match": {
      "title": "elasticsearch"
    }
  },
  "search_after": [
    1463538857,
    "tweet#654323"
  ],
  "sort": [
    {
      "date": "asc"
    },
    {
      "_uid": "desc"
    }
  ]
}

Source: https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/reference/current/search-request-search-after.html