What is the difference between must
and should
in a bool query in Elasticsearch?
If I ONLY want results that contain my terms, should I then use must
?
For example, I have a query that should only contain certain values, and should also have no results that has a date/timestamp lower than today's (time/date - NOW)
. Also, can I use multiple filters inside a must
query like the following code?
"filtered": {
"filter": {
"bool" : {
"must" : {
"term" : { "type" : 1 }
"term" : { "totals" : 14 }
"term" : { "groupId" : 3 }
"range" : {
"expires" : {
"gte": "now"
}
}
},
must means: The clause (query) must appear in matching documents. These clauses must match, like logical AND.
should means: At least one of these clauses must match, like logical OR.
Basically they are used like logical operators AND and OR. See this.
Now in a bool query:
must means: Clauses that must match for the document to be included.
should means: If these clauses match, they increase the _score
; otherwise, they have no effect. They are simply used to refine the relevance score for each document.
Yes you can use multiple filters inside must
.