Elasticsearch - Pick up a new property with calculation in bulk

Question

I'm trying to wrap my head around how ES works, but don't seem to succeed. I'd like it to read JSON files and append a new property to each entry via calculating a value from the existing ones. What would be the syntax for this? I can't seem to put together the information from the documentation to get it to work. Thank you!

I'm trying to do something like

POST /mystuff/1/_update
{
"doc": {
     "recency": (DateTime.now().getMillis() - doc['maxdate'].value)/(24*60*60*1000)
     }
}

to all the docs under /mystuff . (This obviusly doesn't work.)

[EDIT] Sample input:

PUT /mystuff/1
{
...
  "maxdate": "2016-06-14",
...
}

ES Version: 2.3.4

Answer 1

You have to use _update_by_query API by Elasticsearch to update more than one document. You can read more about that here .

Your code will change in following way

POST mystuff/_update_by_query
{
  "script": {
    "inline": "ctx._source.recency = (DateTime.now().getMillis() - DateTime.parse(ctx._source.maxdate).getMillis())/(24*60*60*1000)"
  },
  "query": {
    "match_all": {
    }
  }
}

You should have script inline and script update enabled for this to work.