We will use UK postcodes to illustrate how to use partial matching with
structured data. UK postcodes have a well defined structure. For instance the
postcode W1V 3DG
can be broken down into:
-
W1V
— The outer part, identifies the postal area and district, consists of:-
W
— Area, one or two letters -
1V
— District, one or two numbers, possibly followed by a letter
-
-
3DG
— The inner part, identifies a street or building, consists of:-
3
— Sector, one number -
DG
— Unit, two letters
-
Let’s assume that we are indexing postcodes as exact value not_analyzed
fields, so we could create our index as follows:
PUT /my_index
{
"mappings": {
"address": {
"properties": {
"postcode": {
"type": "string",
"index": "not_analyzed"
}
}
}
}
}
And index some postcodes:
PUT /my_index/address/1
{ "postcode": "W1V 3DG" }
PUT /my_index/address/2
{ "postcode": "W2F 8HW" }
PUT /my_index/address/3
{ "postcode": "W1F 7HW" }
PUT /my_index/address/4
{ "postcode": "WC1N 1LZ" }
PUT /my_index/address/5
{ "postcode": "SW5 0BE" }
Now our data is ready to be queried.