Elasticsearch - how to return only data, not meta information?

Question

When doing a search, Elasticsearch returns a data structure that contains various meta information.

The actual result set is contained within a "hits" field within the JSON result returned from the database.

Is it possible for Elasticsearch to return only the needed data (the contents of then "hits" field) without being embedded within all the other meta data?

I know I could parse the result into JSON and extract it, but I don't want the complexity, hassle, performance hit.

thanks!

Here is an example of the data structure that Elasticsearch returns.

{     "_shards":{         "total" : 5,         "successful" : 5,         "failed" : 0     },     "hits":{         "total" : 1,         "hits" : [             {                 "_index" : "twitter",                 "_type" : "tweet",                 "_id" : "1",                  "_source" : {                     "user" : "kimchy",                     "postDate" : "2009-11-15T14:12:12",                     "message" : "trying out Elastic Search"                 }             }         ]     } } 

Answer 1

You can at least filter the results, even if you cannot extract them. The "common options" page of the REST API explains the "filter_path" option. This lets you filter only the portions of the tree you are interested in. The tree structure is still the same, but without the extra metadata.

I generally add the query option:

&filter_path=hits.hits.*,aggregations.* 

The documentation doesn't say anything about this making your query any faster (I doubt that it does), but at least you could return only the interesting parts.

• Corrected to show only hits.hits.*, since the top level "hits" has metadata as well.