Node-Elastical: Delete by query option

What is Elastical?

Elastical is a Node.js client library for the ElasticSearch REST API.

That’s it for the presentation.

Until a few weeks ago, it wasn’t possible to delete data by query without using a hack. The hack was the following:

client.delete('twitter', 'tweet', '', {q: 'user:Shay'} );

Here, we set id to an empty string and we use the options parameter to perform a search on user with value Shay. Not so practical at all.

Using curl to interact with ElasticSearch, it is possible to delete by query:

curl -XDELETE 'http://localhost:9200/twitter/tweet/_query' -d ' 
  { "term" : { "user" : "kimchy" } 
}
'

This handy way of deleting things in ElasticSearch was not possible with Elastical (unless, you managed to use the hack above).

So I’ve added a new parameter options.query which allow us to perform such a query more easily.

client.delete('twitter', 'tweet', '', {query:
  { "term" : { "user" : "kimchy" } } 
});

When using the query parameter, id and all other options except ignoreMissing will be ignored.

Let’s take a quick look at the code involved:

if(params.query) {
  url = '/' + encode(this.name) + '/' + encode(type) + '/_query';

  this.client._request(url, {method: 'DELETE', json: params.query}
  , function (err, res) {
    if (err) {
      if (ignoreMissing && res && res.found === false) {
        return callback(null, res), undefined;
      } else {
        return callback(err, res), undefined;
      }
    }
    callback(null, res);
  });
} else {

It’s pretty simple. First, we need to build the url, then we’re requesting ElasticSearch on the given url, passing the query in the json parameter. If options.query doesn’t exist, then the original code is used.

As a conclusion, delete by query is now available in Elastical and you should use it!

 

ElasticSearch: Delete By Query API