indices_boost ignore aliasing

[fdejaeger]

It looks that the top level boosting based on the indices (indices_boost) requires that we specify the exact index name. We cannot substitue an alias pointing to a given index. This is very inconvenient since it defeats the purpose of having aliases to hide internal organization of the indices.

[ajhalani]

+1 ..

[exAspArk]

I have the same problem

[sschwell]

+1

[tdoman]

+1, has this been addressed yet? i must be able to use the alias.

[egorz-eng]

+1

[dabit]

Has this been addressed? Please don't tell me this has not been fixed. Just bumped into it in production.

[splittingfield]

+1 as we have just hit this surprising behavior in production as well.

[masaruh]

Things to consider:

• should wildcard expansion be supported as well? (probably yes)
• what if an index belongs to more than one alias in indices_boost parameter? For example, "indices_boost": {"alias1": 3,"alias2": 2} and both aliases include index1. (sum boost? max? min?)

[thiagolocatelli]

It seems the option to add indices_boost with the java client is not available. Is this true? I am using spring-data-elasticsearch and I cant seem to find a way to add indices_boots to my query. Thank you.

[davibe]

+1

[ramseydsilva]

I would like support for wildcard expansion as well.

👍

[LoooooKe]

+1

[aurimasniekis]

Any updates on these? @clintongormley ?

[bjorn-ali-goransson]

Calling all devs. @clintongormley @kimchy Is this for real?

[thehybridtechnician]

+1

[clintongormley]

This change stalled because of the problem of figuring out what to do when an index is boosted more than once via an alias or wildcard. From #8811 (comment) :

@masaruh just reread this thread and i think the correct answer is here:

Make indices_boost take list of index name and boost pair. We may need to do this if we want to have full control. But I somewhat hesitate to do this because it's breaking change.

Then the logic would be that we use the boost from the first time we see the index in the list, so eg:

[  
  { "foo" : 2 },  # alias foo points to bar & baz
  { "bar": 1.5 }, # this boost is ignored because we've already seen bar
  { "*": 1.2 }      # bar and baz are ignored because already seen, but index xyz gets this boost
]

This could be implemented in a bwc way. In fact, the old syntax doesn't need to be removed. We could just add this new syntax as an expert way of controlling boosts.

What do you think?

[masaruh]

Ooh, true. that should work! Thanks @clintongormley.
I'll see what I can do.