Typeahead/Rails: Not working

Question

I am using Elasticsearch & Typeahead in my Rails application to perform autocomplete. I got the idea from here

https://shellycloud.com/blog/2013/10/adding-search-and-autocomplete-to-a-rails-app-with-elasticsearch

I have elasticsearch autocomplete configured correctly, because it works when I access it directly via the browser. However, when I try to use typeahead to call display data from the autocomplete query, it doesn't even trigger in my debugger. Here is my form & javascript where typeahead is called

Form

<script>
  $('#autcomplete_search').typeahead({
    highlight: true
  },
  {
    name: 'apple_game',
    remote: "/search/autocomplete?query=%QUERY"
  });
</script>

<h1>Keyword</h1>
<form action="/search/keyword">
  <div>
    <%= text_field_tag :query, params[:query], class: "form-control", id: "autcomplete_search" %>
    <br/>
    <br/>
  </div>
  <div>
    <input type="submit">/</input>
  </div>
</form>

Controller

  def autocomplete
    es = ESClient.get_client
    games = es.suggest index: 'games',
      body: { 
        apple_game: {
          text: params[:keyword],
          completion: {
            field: "title"}
        }
      }
    render json: games
  end

Sample browser result from controller method

{
    "_shards": {
        "total": 5,
        "successful": 5,
        "failed": 0
    },
    "apple_game": [
        {
            "text": "ma",
            "offset": 0,
            "length": 2,
            "options": [
                {
                    "text": "Macabre Mysteries: Curse of the Nightingale Collector's Edition HD",
                    "score": 1
                },
                {
                    "text": "Mad Cop - Police Car Race and Drift (Ads Free)",
                    "score": 1
                },
                {
                    "text": "Mad Freebording (Snowboarding)",
                    "score": 1
                },
                {
                    "text": "Mad Merx: Nemesis",
                    "score": 1
                },
                {
                    "text": "Mad River Whitewater Kayak Rush",
                    "score": 1
                }
            ]
        }
    ]
}

EDIT I also noticed the following error in console whenever typeahead runs

Uncaught Error: missing source 

Answer 1

Ok, I think you have two problems.

Problem 1:

You look to me like you are using pre 10.0 typeahead API. To use remote, you have to use Bloodhound or something like it to fetch your results.

I implemented this recently, and here is a working example:

var $vartypeahead = $(yourjqueryelement);
var engine = new Bloodhound({
  name: 'typeaheads',
  remote: {"url":'/search/typeahead?q=%QUERY'},
  datumTokenizer: function(d) { return d;},
  queryTokenizer: function(d) { return d;}
});
engine.initialize();

$vartypeahead.typeahead({
          "minLength": 2,
          "highlight": true
        },
        {
          "source": engine.ttAdapter()
          });

I did have to modify the above slightly from what I've done; I use backbone on the frontend and splice the above into it (I have a PR at the typeahead project for that)

Problem #2

As far as ES goes, I'm not sure you have your mappings right, usually your mapping for a typeahead project is going to look something like this:

{
  "settings": {
    "analysis": {
      "filter": {
        "autocomplete_ngram": {
          "max_gram": 24,
          "min_gram": 2,
          "type": "edge_ngram"
        }
      },
      "analyzer": {
        "autocomplete_index": {
          "filter": [
            "lowercase",
            "autocomplete_ngram"
          ],
          "tokenizer": "keyword"
        },
        "autocomplete_search": {
          "filter": [
            "lowercase"
          ],
          "tokenizer": "keyword"
        }
      }
    },
    "index": {
      "number_of_shards": 20,
      "number_of_replicas": 1
    }
  },
  "mappings": {
    "yourtype": {
      "properties": {
        "title": {
          "type": "multi_field",
          "fields": {
            "title_edgengram": {
              "type": "string",
              "index": "analyzed",
              "index_analyzer": "autocomplete_index",
              "search_analyzer": "autocomplete_search"
            },
            "title": {
              "type": "string",
              "index": "not_analyzed"
            }
          }
        }
      }
    }
  }
}