Sorting in Elastic for String Fields

I encountered this issue with elasticsearch while I was trying to implement the sorting feature for one of my projects. The problem is that the sorting is not working as how I expected it for my string fields.

This is how the sorting problem looks like. Say you have this data.

[
  {
    "name": "Juan Andres"
  },
  {
    "name": "Jasmin Mae"
  },
  {
    "name": "Jorge"
  }
]

When I do a regular sort via the name field in ASC order with a sample request like below:

{
  "sort": [
    {
      "name": "asc"
    }
  ]
}

I get this result:

[
  {
    "_source": {
      "name": "Juan Andres"
    },
    "sort": ["Andres"]
  },
  {
    "_source": {
      "name": "Jasmin Mae"
    },
    "sort": ["Jasmin"]
  },
  {
    "_source": {
      "name": "Jorge"
    },
    "sort": ["Jorge"]
  }
]

This is not the sorting I want to happen. The reason why this is happening is because my field name is being analyzed. Elasticsearch uses the tokens to do the sorting. This is actually not advisable.

I can just change the string index to not_analyzed but I need it for my full-text search.

To make this work, I need to make a field both analyzed and not_analyzed. This can be done by using the fields property. Fields is a newer version of multi-field. Your property will basically have two parts - one tokenized and one unanalyzed. Since you have both, you can use the not_analyzed part for sorting, and the analyzed part for the full-text search. You can read more about it here.

I modified my type-mapping for the field to this:

"name" :   {
  "type": "string",
  "fields": {
      "raw":   { "type": "string", "index": "not_analyzed" }
  }
}

Once I had name configured to this, I was able to sort it properly. I needed to indicate the sort field to name.raw instead of just plain name. My new sort request looks like below:

{
  "sort": [
    {
      "name.raw": "asc"
    }
  ]
}

Once I ran the command above, I get the correct sorted list.

[
  {
    "_source": {
      "name": "Jasmin Mae"
    },
    "sort": ["Jasmin Mae"]
  },
  {
    "_source": {
      "name": "Jorge"
    },
    "sort": ["Jorge"]
  },
  {
    "_source": {
      "name": "Juan Andres"
    },
    "sort": ["Juan Andres"]
  } 
]

The sorting criteria becomes the not_analyzed version of the field.