Query-api.md

Query API

For the most part, searching works as follows.

• The user interacts with the frontend interface, and the frontend constructs a query JSON in the elasticsearch query DSL.
• The frontend makes a request to the backend with the query in the payload and the backend returns the result.

So as a minimal example, the frontend can send a POST request to /api/es/example_corpus/_search with the following payload.

{
    "es_query": { "match_all": {} }
}

There are a few more things to keep in mind.

Query parameters in URL

First, the request URL can also include extra query parameters, which will be merged into the elasticsearch query. So if the above request is made to /api/es/example_corpus/_search?size=10, the query forwarded to elasticsearch is

{ "match_all": {}, "size": 10 }

Tags

The query API also allows one additional parameter besides es_query, which is tags. This should give a list of IDs for tags that the query should be filtered on. The backend is reponsible for merging tags into the query. For example, this is a request for all documents with tag 42:

{
    "es_query": {
        "match_all": {}
    },
    "tags": [42],
}