Django AJAX Search With Elasticsearch

Wed, 10 Jan 2018 00:00:00 +0000

In this post I want to go over how I implemented a very neat AJAX search using Elasticsearch in Django. Let's get started!

The Search Template

The starting point of our search feature will be the search template. That is, the template that contains the input field where the user will type in the search keywords.

This template is extremely simple and does not need a <form> tag. I will create it as a partial under templates/search.html:

{% csrf_token %}
<input id="search" name="q" placeholder="Search...">

Notice how we have given the input a name with the value of q. This will be important when our view receives the query from this input field.

I can then render this partial in the main template like this:

{% include 'search.html' %}

Querying Nested Documents in ElasticSearch

Mon, 23 Oct 2017 00:00:00 +0000

The other day I was using ElasticSearch to build an index that would contain book documents. These book documents would then contain many pages, each page indicating its page number in the book, and its content as text, extrated from its own PDF file.

I wanted to perform some queries on a specific book so that ElasticSearch would return all the pages in the book which contained a certain word in its text field.

Nested Documents

ElasticSearch 5 supports nested documents. These are internally separate documents that will belong to a certain parent, in this case, a book. Before creating any books, we must first define a nested object mapping for the index:

PUT /my_index

{
  "mappings": {
    "book": {
      "properties": {
        "pages": {
          "type": "nested",
          "properties": {
            "id":    { "type": "integer"  },
            "text": { "type": "text"  },
          }
        }
      }
    }
  }
}

Notice how the mapping is created using a PUT request at the index level.

elasticsearch on Andrés Álvarez

Django AJAX Search With Elasticsearch

The Search Template

Querying Nested Documents in ElasticSearch

Nested Documents