using NEST with Elastic Search for collections

Question

I'm trying to get my hands dirty with Elastic Search via the NEST .Net api and running into a couple of problems. I suspect I've misunderstood something, or am modelling my docs incorrectly but would appreciate some help.

I have a document with collections in it. A similar trite example below :

public class Company
{
    public DateTime RegisteredOn {get;set;}
    public string Name {get;set;}

    [ElasticProperty(Type = FieldType.nested)]
    public List<Employee> Employees {get;set;}
}

public class Employee 
{
   public string FirstName {get;set;}
   public string LastName {get;set;}

   [ElasticProperty(Type = FieldType.nested)]
   public List<SalesFigure> SalesFigures {get;set}
}

public class SaleFigure
{
   public int AverageMonthlySaleValue {get;set;}
   public int AverageVolumeSold {get;set;}
}

I've created an index with some data in at each level of the hierarchy and before indexing have called client.MapFromAttributes<Company>();

The following works, but I'd like to understand how I'd find all companies with employees with a firstName of Bob, and or find all companies with employees who have a an average AverageMonthlySaleValue > $1100

client.Search<Company>(query => query.Index("companies").Type("company")
                                 .From(0)
                                 .Size(100)
                                 .Filter(x => x.Term(n => n.Name, "Microsoft")));

Nested queries/filters have been suggested as has suggestions that I ought to flatten my document which I can do, but I'm trying to create a model which better represents the real domain so am in a quandary.

Equally, I know that I'll also have to use facets at some point so want to structure everything correctly to support that.

Thanks Tim

Tim Butterfield Tim Butterfield · Accepted Answer · 2013-06-18T13:18:53

So it turns out there wasn't much wrong with the structure of my document. The example is trite and the real property I was querying on a collection was a string, not an int, so case sensitivity kicked in.

I had to change the query to use a lower case string value for comparison which worked. Something like the following worked.

client.Search<Company>(query => query.Index("companies")
               .Type("company")
               .From(0)
               .Size(100)
               .Filter(x => x.Term("company.employees.firstName", "microsoft")));

I've still to work out how to use a lamda in place of "company.employees.firstName" but it works for now.

using NEST with Elastic Search for collections

1 Answers