Elasticsearch: Updating document

Documents in Elastic search are immutable, I mean we can’t change them; we need to update them entirely.

How to update them?

Update the document using PUT request.

GET xyz/employees/1

Above snippet return following information.

{
   "_index": "xyz",
   "_type": "employees",
   "_id": "1",
   "_version": 5,
   "found": true,
   "_source": {
      "firstName": "Phalgun",
      "lastName": "Garimella",
      "hobbies": [
         "Watching movies",
         "Stamp collection",
         "Reading books",
         "Playing Cricket"
      ],
      "age": 30
   }
}

Now update the document using PUT request.

PUT xyz/employees/1
{
  "firstName" : "Sunil Kumar",
  "lastName" : "Kumar",
  "age" : 36
}

You will get following response.

{
   "_index": "xyz",
   "_type": "employees",
   "_id": "1",
   "_version": 6,
   "created": false
}

As you observe version number is incremented by 1 and created attribute is set to false, since we are not creating new document, we just updated existing document.

GET xyz/employees/1

{
   "_index": "xyz",
   "_type": "employees",
   "_id": "1",
   "_version": 6,
   "found": true,
   "_source": {
      "firstName": "Sunil Kumar",
      "lastName": "Kumar",
      "age": 36
   }
}

As you observe the response, it don't contains hobbies field, it is because we are overriding entire document with new data (Since documents in elastic search are immutable).

What happen to old document?

Elastic search mark old version document as deleted and update it with new version document. Old document is not deleted immediately; it will be deleted by background process after some time.

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