Using the nested datatype is one alternative for the inner objects and it solves the issue with the flattening of documents in Elasticsearch. Let's see how we can use the nested datatype. Let's consider the following example:
curl -XPOST localhost:9200/authors/author/1 -d'{
"name": "Multi G. Enre",
"books": [
{
"name": "Guns and lasers",
"genre": "scifi",
"publisher": "orbit"
},
{
"name": "Dead in the night",
"genre": "thriller",
"publisher": "penguin"
}
]
}'
curl -XPOST localhost:9200/authors/author/2 -d'{
"name": "Alastair Reynolds",
"books": [
{
"name": "Revelation Space",
"genre": "scifi",
"publisher": "penguin"
}
]
}'If you examine carefully, you would ideally notice no difference as to how the document looks like when compared to the inner objects. This is true as well. To make your Elasticsearch instance understand your intention of using the nested datatype, you must...