Mapping an associative array in Elasticsearch

Question

I'm relatively new to elasticsearch and I would like to map one of my field to an associative array structure.

What I currently Have :

One product of type product in the index products:

{
    "name":"Nexus 10",
    "category":"Tablets",
    "interests": {
        "1":30,
        "3":70
    }
}

As you can see, the field interests is an associative array. The key is a User ID and the value is the number of times the user talked about this product.

Dynamic mapping provided me with :

{
   "products":{
      "mappings":{
         "product":{
            "properties":{
               "category":{
                  "type":"string"
               },
               "interests":{
                  "properties":{
                     "1":{
                        "type":"long"
                     },
                     "3":{
                        "type":"long"
                     },
                  }
               },
               "name":{
                  "type":"string"
               }
            }
         }
      }
   }
}

What I want :

Since I'm going to have lots of entries in the interests field, I don't want the dynamic mapping to map each ID.

The idea is to be able to look for a specific user ID in the interests field so that I can boost the score of the result depending on the number of times this particular user talked about this product.

I would like to be able to map this kind of structure.

Do you have any idea how to achieve that?

Thanks,

Answer 1

You will need to change your object definitions.

Having keys based on what's actually values is problematic, as it will lead to an ever-growing mapping and thus cluster state. It'll also lead to quirky searches.

This is a common enough question/issue that I dedicated a section to it in my article on Troubleshooting Elasticsearch searches, for Beginners.

What you probably want to do is to either use nested documents, or parent-child-relations. If you update the counts very often, you'd want to use parent-child, as nested documents will cause reindexing of the entire thing. Nested doc will be faster search time, though, and you'll very likely want to throttle the updates somehow anyway.

If you structure the documents like this, you can easily use nested mappings, and you won't end up with one field per user.

name: Nexus 10
category: Tablets
interests: 
    - user_id: 1
      mentions: 30
    - user_id: 3
      mentions: 70