Validating your queries

Sometimes, the queries that your application sends to Elasticsearch are generated automatically from multiple criteria or even worse; they are generated by some kind of wizard, where the end user can create complicated queries. The issue is that sometimes it is not easy to tell if the query is correct or not. To help with this, Elasticsearch exposes the validate API.

Using the validate API

The validate API is very simple. Instead of sending the query to the _search endpoint, we send it to the _validate/query endpoint. And that's it. Let's look at the following query:

{
  "query" : {
    "bool" : {
      "must" : {
        "term" : {
          "title" : "crime"
        }
      },
      "should" : {
        "range : {
          "year" : {
            "from" : 1900,
            "to" : 2000
          }
        }
      },
      "must_not" : {
        "term" : {
          "otitle" : "nothing"
        }
      }
    }
  }
}

This query has already been used in this book. We know...