CODEWITHSUNDEEP
elasticsearch
Mani
Mani

Reputation: 783

Looking for best practice to filter suggestions from Completion Suggester

I’m currently evaluating the Completion Suggester functionality in ElasticSearch to realize auto complete. It does look very decent so far. However I’m struggling a little bit with permissions.

Let’s assume I have an index with hotels like the example on the ElesticSearch website. Besides getting the hotels that match with the given phrase I also wanna check whether the user is allowed to see the "suggestion" or not. Something like hotels which are for a certain clientele only. I added a new field for saving the group/permission just as a simple string for testing purpose. What I want to accomplish is to filter by the groups.

The mapping would look something like that:

{
  "mappings": {
    "hotel" : {
      "properties" : {
        "name" : { "type" : "string" },
        "city" : { "type" : "string" },
        "group" : { "type" : "string" },
        "name_suggest" : {
          "type" : "completion",
          "payloads" : true
        }
      }
    }
  }
}'

And with the following documents:

{
  "name" :         "Mercure Hotel Munich",
  "city" :         "Munich",
  "group "   :     "1",
  "name_suggest" : "Mercure Hotel Munich"
}'

{
  "name" :         "Monaco Hotel",
  "city" :         "Munich",
  "group"    :     "2",
  "name_suggest" : "Monaco Hotel"
}'

So, if a user with the group “1” is entering “M” he should only get "Mercure Hotel Munich". Vice versa, a user with group “2” is typing in “M” he should only get "Monaco Hotel ".

I’ve seen some similar posts on Stackoverflow regarding to Completion Suggester + filter and that it doesn’t work together.

In my honest opinion it’s not an unusual use case that some documents are for certain users. Therefore I don’t want to suggest anything which the user is not allowed to access.

So my question is: What is the best practice to accomplish this? I mean considering performance and maintainability regarding to upcoming ES versions.

Shall we stick with the edgeNGram solution until https://github.com/elasticsearch/elasticsearch/pull/4044 is integrated? Or is there another solution by using completion suggester?

TIA

Upvotes: 5

Views: 3299

Answers (2)

dg6
dg6

Reputation: 480

As per version 1.2.0, you can add context to your suggester and obtain filtered suggestions.

Introductory blog post

Full Docs

Also see How can I add filter to Completion Suggester in ElasticSearch?

Upvotes: 3

DrTech
DrTech

Reputation: 17319

The completion suggester doesn't use traditional search at all, so you can't automatically post-filter your suggestions. You have a few options:

  1. You've specified payloads: true but you don't seem to be using them. If you only have a few groups then you could include them in the payload and filter out invalid suggestions in your application.

  2. Again, with only a few groups you could wait for the ContextSuggester to be merged.

  3. Retrieve more suggestions than you need, then run a search which will filter out invalid results.

  4. Use the edge-ngrams approach

Upvotes: 0

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