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Retrieving a Documentedit
To get the document out of Elasticsearch, we use the same _index,
_type, and _id, but the HTTP verb changes to GET:
GET /website/blog/123?pretty
The response includes the by-now-familiar metadata elements, plus the _source
field, which contains the original JSON document that we sent to Elasticsearch
when we indexed it:
{
"_index" : "website",
"_type" : "blog",
"_id" : "123",
"_version" : 1,
"found" : true,
"_source" : {
"title": "My first blog entry",
"text": "Just trying this out...",
"date": "2014/01/01"
}
}
Adding pretty to the query-string parameters for any request, as in the
preceding example, causes Elasticsearch to pretty-print the JSON response to
make it more readable. The _source field, however, isn’t pretty-printed.
Instead we get back exactly the same JSON string that we passed in.
The response to the GET request includes {"found": true}. This confirms that
the document was found. If we were to request a document that doesn’t exist,
we would still get a JSON response, but found would be set to false.
Also, the HTTP response code would be 404 Not Found instead of 200 OK.
We can see this by passing the -i argument to curl, which causes it to
display the response headers:
curl -i -XGET http://localhost:9200/website/blog/124?pretty
The response now looks like this:
HTTP/1.1 404 Not Found
Content-Type: application/json; charset=UTF-8
Content-Length: 83
{
"_index" : "website",
"_type" : "blog",
"_id" : "124",
"found" : false
}
Retrieving Part of a Documentedit
By default, a GET request will return the whole document, as stored in the
_source field. But perhaps all you are interested in are the title and text fields.
Individual fields can be requested by using the _source parameter. Multiple
fields can be specified in a comma-separated list:
GET /website/blog/123?_source=title,text
The _source field now contains just the fields that we requested and has
filtered out the date field:
{
"_index" : "website",
"_type" : "blog",
"_id" : "123",
"_version" : 1,
"found" : true,
"_source" : {
"title": "My first blog entry" ,
"text": "Just trying this out..."
}
}
Or if you want just the _source field without any metadata, you can use
the _source endpoint:
GET /website/blog/123/_source
which returns just the following:
{
"title": "My first blog entry",
"text": "Just trying this out...",
"date": "2014/01/01"
}