Creating a query

Before search, a query must be built: ElasticSearch provides several ways to build these queries. In this recipe, will see how to create a query object via QueryBuilder and via simple strings.

Getting ready

You need a working ElasticSearch cluster and a working copy of Maven. The code of this recipe is in chapter_10/nativeclient in the code bundle of this book available on Packt's website and the referred class is QueryCreation.

How to do it...

For creating a query, we will perform the steps given as follows:

1. There are several ways to define a query in ElasticSearch; they are interoperable.

   Generally a query can be defined as a:

   • QueryBuilder: This is a helper to build a query.
   • XContentBuilder: This is a helper to create JSON code. We discussed it in the Managing mapping recipe in this chapter. The JSON code to be generated is similar to the previous REST, but converted in programmatic code.
   • Array of bytes or string: In this case, it's usually the JSON to be executed as...