Prefix Query not working in ElasticSearch

Question

I've loaded the 'accounts.json' data from the following link into an ES instance on my machine:

https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/reference/1.5/_exploring_your_data.html

This adds 1000 docs to the index 'bank' with the type 'account'. Simple enough!

Every doc has this structure:

{
    "account_number": 0,
    "balance": 16623,
    "firstname": "Bradshaw",
    "lastname": "Mckenzie",
    "age": 29,
    "gender": "F",
    "address": "244 Columbus Place",
    "employer": "Euron",
    "email": "[email protected]",
    "city": "Hobucken",
    "state": "CO"
}

Now I'm trying to run a simple 'prefix' query on this index.

Here is one that works just fine (comes back with plenty of correct results):

curl -XPOST 'localhost:9200/bank/_search?pretty' -d '
{
  "query": { "prefix" : { "address" : "963" } }
}'

Here is another one (this one doesn't work):

curl -XPOST 'localhost:9200/bank/_search?pretty' -d '
{
  "query": { "prefix" : { "firstname" : "Op" } }
}'

But there is definitely a record present which should be returned in the previous request. The following works:

curl -XPOST 'localhost:9200/bank/_search?pretty' -d '
{
  "query": { "match" : { "firstname" : "Opal" } }
}'

I have also verified the mapping and there doesn't seem to be any difference in the 2 fields, 'firstname' and 'address':

curl -XGET 'localhost:9200/bank/_mapping/account?pretty'

Here is the relevant mapping portion for those 2:

 "address": {
     "type": "string"
 }

 "firstname": {
     "type": "string"
 }

Can't figure out why one prefix query works and the other one doesn't. Any pointers on what I'm missing?

Sloan Ahrens · Accepted Answer · 2015-11-16 19:48:29Z

14

I think you'll find that this will do what you expect:

curl -XPOST 'localhost:9200/bank/_search?pretty' -d '
{
  "query": { "prefix" : { "firstname" : "op" } }
}'

The reason is that, since you have not specified an analyzer, the standard analyzer is used, which converts tokens to lower-case.

Here is some code that I used to test out my suspicion:

http://sense.qbox.io/gist/a4f087cee78fd694dd4223eb56e842e1cd1d5847

answered Nov 16, 2015 at 19:48

Sloan Ahrens

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2 Comments

vksinghh Over a year ago

Excellent! Thanks for the answer Sloan. That worked. I knew it was something like that.

vibhor1997a Over a year ago

Hey, this link is broken now :(

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