How to do it...

The GET method allows us to return a document given its index, type, and ID.

The REST API URL is as follows:

http://<server>/<index_name>/_doc/<id>

To get a document, we will perform the following steps:

1. If we consider the document that we indexed in the previous recipe, the call will be as follows:

GET /myindex/_doc/2qLrAfPVQvCRMe7Ku8r0Tw

1. The result returned by Elasticsearch should be the indexed document:

{
  "_index" : "myindex",
  "_type" : "_doc",
  "_id" : "2qLrAfPVQvCRMe7Ku8r0Tw",
  "_version" : 1,
  "_seq_no" : 0,
  "_primary_term" : 1,
  "found" : true,
  "_source" : {
    "id" : "1234",
    "date" : "2013-06-07T12:14:54",
    "customer_id" : "customer1",
    ... truncated ...
  }
}

1. Our indexed data is contained in the _source parameter, but other information is returned:

• • _index: The index that stores the document
  • _type: The type of the document
  • _id: The ID of the document
  • _version: The version of the document
  • found: Whether the document has been found

If the record is missing, a 404 error is returned as the status code, and the return JSON will be as follows:

{
  "_index" : "myindex",
  "_type" : "_doc",
  "_id" : "2qLrAfPVQvCRMe7Kud8r0Tw",
  "found" : false
}