Mapping a completion field

For providing search functionalities for our user, one of the most common requirements is to provide text suggestion for our query.

Elasticsearch provides a helper for archiving this functionality via a special type mapping called completion.

Getting ready

You need an up-and-running Elasticsearch installation as we described in the Downloading and installing Elasticsearch recipe in Chapter 2, Downloading and Setup.

How to do it...

The definition of a completion field is similar to the previous core type fields. For example, to provide suggestion for a name with alias, we can write a similar mapping:

{ 
    "name": {"type": "string", "copy_to":["suggest"]}, 
    "alias": {"type": "string", "copy_to":["suggest"]}, 
    "suggest": { 
        "type": "completion", 
        "payloads": true, 
        "analyzer": "simple", 
        "search_analyzer": "simple" 
    } 
} 

In this example, we have defined two string fields name...