Tl;DR : I parsed ElasticSearch source and generated a HTML app that allows you to build ElasticSearch queries using its JSON Query DSL. You can see it in action here: http://supermind.org/elasticsearch/query-dsl-builder.html

I really like ElasticSearch's JSON-based Query DSL – it lets you create fairly complex search queries in a relatively painless fashion.

I do not, however, fancy the query DSL documentation. I've often found it inadequate, inconsistent with the source, and at times downright confusing.

Browsing the source, I realised that ES parses JSON queries in a fairly regular fashion, which would lend itself well to regex-based parsing of the Java source in order to generate documention of the JSON 'schema'.

The parsing I did in Java, and the actual query builder UI is in HTML and Javascript. The Java phase outputs a JSON data model of the query DSL, which the HTML app then uses to dynamically build the HTML forms etc.

Because of the consistent naming conventions of the objects, I was also able to embed links to documentation and github source within the page itself. Very useful!

You can see the result in action here: http://supermind.org/elasticsearch/query-dsl-builder.html

PS: I first did this for ES version 1.2.1, and then subsequently for 1.4.3 and now 1.7.2. The approach seems to work consistently across versions, with minor changes required in the Java backend parsing between version bumps. Hopefully this remains the case when we go to ES 2.x.

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