Learning Elasticsearch

Partial updates

In the previous section, we discussed how to update using the entire document. In this section, we will discuss how to update only one or two fields in the document. Elasticsearch provides the update API to update an existing document partially. The update API first retrieves the old document, then uses the _source of the existing documents to apply the changes, deletes the old document, and indexes the document as a new document. The fields to be updated are specified in the doc field of the request.

For partial updates to work, _source needs to enabled.

Let's say we want to update just the name of the person and not worry about any other field in the document. We will use the update API to update the existing document as ...