Elasticsearch highlighting with wildcard does not work as expected

Question

I am using elasticsearch highlight for sometime now and having some problems. here is the highlight query:

"highlight" : {
"pre_tags" : [ "<span class=\"mark\">" ],
"post_tags" : [ "</span>" ],
"order" : "score",
"encoder" : "html",
"require_field_match" : false,
"fields" : {
  "*" : { }
}

}

I am specifying * in fields because I need highlighting for all possible fields and do not want to specify them all. The problem is it that if I use field query it highlights also fields that were not queried, For example if I query for:

Name:Macdonalds

It will highlight also:

Name:**Macdonalds**
Description: **macdonalds** fast food...

I am using query_string query, and I cannot set require_field_match to true since I am also searching free test in all fields and if I set this parameter to true it does not highlight anything...

Any suggestions? Has someone stumble on such issue?

Answer 1

Well, I have managed to workaround this issue (following @Will comment) When specifying explicitly all fields you want highlighting on in the query itself and setting require_field_match" : true The highlight works as expected :) a little strange... but works. This way it has an issue highlighting fields that are not strings, so pay attention.

 {
      "from" : 0,
      "size" : 10,
      "query" : {
        "query_string" : {
          "query" : "some query",
          "fields" : [ "field1", "field2", ... ],
          "use_dis_max" : true
        }
      },
      "highlight" : {
        "pre_tags" : [ "<span class=\"mark\">" ],
        "post_tags" : [ "</span>" ],
        "order" : "score",
        "encoder" : "html",
        "require_field_match" : true,
        "fields" : {
          "*" : { }
        }
      }
    }