Sorting a search

While searching for results, the most common criteria in ElasticSearch is the relevance against a text query. Thus the real world applications need to control the sorting criteria. The following are the typical scenarios:

• Sorting a user by surname and name

• Sorting items by stock, price (ascendant, descendent)

• Sorting documents by size, file type, source, and so on

Getting ready

You need a working ElasticSearch cluster and an index populated with the script available in the online code.

How to do it...

For sorting the results, we need to perform the steps given as follows:

1. We need to add a sort section to our query as follows:

   curl -XGET 'http://127.0.0.1:9200/test-index/test-type/_search?pretty=true' -d '{"query":{"match_all":{}},
      "sort" : [
         {"price" : {"order" : "asc", "mode" : "avg", "ignore_unmapped":true, "missing":"_last"}},
   "_score"
      ]
   }'

2. The returned result should be similar to the following one:

   …,
     "hits" : {
       "total" : 3,
       "max_score" : null,
       "hits"...