Simulating field collapsing/grouping by field in Elastic Search

Question

Elastic Search does not currently (as of 0.18.4) support field collapsing. Is there a good way to simulate this, as to avoid N search queries?

Answer 1

Probably not the answer you're looking for but: As far as I know, and according to this ticket, the only real workaround is to select a larger result set and group on the client side.

Answer 2

Depending on what your use case is you might find parent/child support or nested types useful instead.

You can find more about parent/child support here: https://github.com/elasticsearch/elasticsearch/issues/553 (and then in corresponding query/filter doc pages)

As for nested types, check here: http://www.elasticsearch.org/guide/reference/mapping/nested-type.html