Dealing with Categories in documents for elasticsearch - arrays

Question

Been wrestling with this a while and need some help.
I have a document array in PHP that looks something like this
array("title"=>"some title",
"description" => "Short description",
"categories" => array ( array("id" => "1", "name" => "category 1"),
array("id" => "5", "name" => "category 5"),
array("id" => "55", "name" => "category 55"),
)
);
So basically I have a document that has many categories assigned. My ultimate aim with this is to return all documents that contain a specific category by ID.
I have setup mappings, and the documents are being index OK. I have tried both "nested" type of mapping for category, no mapping at all, and "lists" type but that did not work at all with the error on creation of the mappings.
sample of how I set up "lists"
array(
'_source' => array(
'enabled' => true
),
'properties' => array(
'title' => array(
'type' => 'string',
'analyzer' => 'standard'
),
'description' => array(
'type' => 'string',
'analyzer' => 'standard'
),
'categories' => array(
"type" => "lists",
"properties"=> array(
"id" => array("type"=> "integer" ),
"name" => array( "type"=> "string" ),
),
),
)
);
And for completeness, how I set it up as "nested"
array(
'_source' => array(
'enabled' => true
),
'properties' => array(
'title' => array(
'type' => 'string',
'analyzer' => 'standard'
),
'description' => array(
'type' => 'string',
'analyzer' => 'standard'
),
'categories' => array(
"type" => "nested",
"properties"=> array(
"id" => array("type"=> "integer" ),
"name" => array( "type"=> "string" ),
),
),
)
);
When trying to make a search against nested mappings, it tells me
QueryParsingException: [nested] nested object under path [categories] is not of nested type
When trying to make a nested search against an un mapped set of categories (defaulting to what the system finds) it also returns the same error as above.
My questions are:
what mapping should I setup for these array of categories ?
Given a "match_all" query, what filter (and how) should I use to get a single category?
so much thanks in advance for anyone who even takes the time to read this, let alone answer. I'm really hopeful that you can help.

Answer 1

The answer was pretty simple. I had misread the documentation and has added an extra object type into my mapping requests that did not need to be there.
'categories' => array(
"type" => "lists",
"properties"=> array(
"id" => array("type"=> "integer" ),
"name" => array( "type"=> "string" ),
),
),
should have been
'categories' => array(
"properties"=> array(
"id" => array("type"=> "integer" ),
"name" => array( "type"=> "string" ),
),
),
The array type does not need to be defined as a type, it is assumed to be an array. Once removed, it loads the mapping properly.
Now on to searching....