Question

I have a simple sounding problem according highlighting of a field with elasticsearch version 0.18.6. What I want to do is to highlight a complete field and get the content back (either highlighted or if there are no matches then without highlighting – but always the full field content!)

On elasticsearch.org I found this:

If the number_of_fragments value is set to 0 then no fragments are produced, instead the whole content of the field is returned, and of course it is highlighted.

So I tried this to achieve what I want:

  final SearchResponse response = client.prepareSearch(indexName)
                .setSearchType(SearchType.DFS_QUERY_THEN_FETCH)
                .setTypes(FEED_TYPE)
                .setQuery(queryString(query).field("title").field("description").field("keywords"))
                .addHighlightedField("title", 0, 0)
                .addHighlightedField("description", 0, 0)
                .addFields("url", "iconUrl", "keywords")
                .setSize(size)
                .setFrom(start)
                .execute().actionGet();

The Signature of this method is:

 public SearchRequestBuilder addHighlightedField(java.lang.String name, int fragmentSize, int numberOfFragments)

Do I miss something here? Or did I misunderstand that it only returns the full content if there is at least one term to hightlight?

Thanks for all answers.

Answer 1

I don’t think it’s possible to achieve exactly what you want at the moment. The highlightFields collection contains only fields that were highlighted. You can do something like this:

final SearchResponse response = client.prepareSearch(indexName)
            .setSearchType(SearchType.DFS_QUERY_THEN_FETCH)
            .setTypes(FEED_TYPE)
            .setQuery(queryString(query).field("title").field("description").field("keywords"))
            .addHighlightedField("title", 0, 0)
            .addHighlightedField("description", 0, 0)
            .addFields("title", "description", "url", "iconUrl", "keywords")
            .setSize(size)
            .setFrom(start)
            .execute().actionGet();

It will always return you all fields in

response.hits().getAt(i).fields();

and fields that were highlighted in

response.hits().getAt(i).highlightFields();

While displaying results, you can check highlightFields() first and if a field is not present there, use fields() instead.