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Exists query

Use the exists query to search for documents that contain a specific field.

An indexed value will not exist for a document field in any of the following cases:

• The field has "index" : false specified in the mapping.
• The field in the source JSON is null or [].
• The length of the field value exceeds the ignore_above setting in the mapping.
• The field value is malformed and ignore_malformed is defined in the mapping.

An indexed value will exist for a document field in any of the following cases:

• The value is an array that contains one or more null elements and one or more non-null elements (for example, ["one", null]).
• The value is an empty string ("" or "-").
• The value is a custom null_value, as defined in the field mapping.

Example

For example, consider an index that contains the following two documents:

PUT testindex/_doc/1
{
  "title": "The wind rises"
}

PUT testindex/_doc/2
{
  "title": "Gone with the wind",
  "description": "A 1939 American epic historical film"
}

The following query searches for documents that contain the description field:

GET testindex/_search
{
  "query": {
    "exists": {
      "field": "description"
    }
  }
}

The response contains the matching document:

{
  "took": 3,
  "timed_out": false,
  "_shards": {
    "total": 1,
    "successful": 1,
    "skipped": 0,
    "failed": 0
  },
  "hits": {
    "total": {
      "value": 1,
      "relation": "eq"
    },
    "max_score": 1,
    "hits": [
      {
        "_index": "testindex",
        "_id": "2",
        "_score": 1,
        "_source": {
          "title": "Gone with the wind",
          "description": "A 1939 American epic historical film"
        }
      }
    ]
  }
}

Finding documents with missing indexed values

To find documents with missing indexed values, you can use the must_not Boolean query with the inner exists query. For example, the following request searches for documents in which the description field is missing:

GET testindex/_search
{
  "query": {
    "bool": {
      "must_not": {
        "exists": {
          "field": "description"
        }
      }
    }
  }
}

The response contains the matching document:

{
  "took": 19,
  "timed_out": false,
  "_shards": {
    "total": 1,
    "successful": 1,
    "skipped": 0,
    "failed": 0
  },
  "hits": {
    "total": {
      "value": 1,
      "relation": "eq"
    },
    "max_score": 0,
    "hits": [
      {
        "_index": "testindex",
        "_id": "1",
        "_score": 0,
        "_source": {
          "title": "The wind rises"
        }
      }
    ]
  }
}

Parameters

The query accepts the name of the field (<field>) as a top-level parameter.