How do I update metadata of Elasticsearch Document Store?

[jais001]

Hi team,

I am using Haystack with ElasticsearchDocumentStore in my application. My doubt is the following: I have a requirement where on user interactions, we need to update a field(say priority) in the metadata. So, is there an option in the retriever or any other way, to get the task done?

[julian-risch]

Hi @JaisVJ you can do communicate document updates directly to your running Elasticsearch instance and don't need to use Haystack for that: https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/reference/7.17/docs-update.html#_update_part_of_a_document

For some use cases one can use the custom_query parameter in Haystack here to interact with Elasticsearch but I don't think it works for updating a document's meta data:

haystack/haystack/nodes/retriever/sparse.py

Line 33 in dcb132b

:param custom_query: query string as per Elasticsearch DSL with a mandatory query placeholder(query).

Last but not least, what you can do is overwrite the existing document by using write_documents and using the id of the existing document. As the id already exisits, elasticsearch will overwrite the existing document with the new one.

[jais001]

Thank you @julian-risch!! Appreciate your prompt response, I will try these options.