Let’s construct a slightly more complicated example: a filtered query that contains both a filter and a query. This is a very common activity in elasticsearch queries, so it will be a good demonstration.

The curl version of the query:

curl -XGET 'localhost:9200/my_index/my_type/_search' -d '{
    "query" : {
        "filtered" : {
            "filter" : {
                "term" : {
                    "my_field" : "abc"
                }
            },
            "query" : {
                "match" : {
                    "my_other_field" : "xyz"
                }
            }
        }
    }
}'

​

And in PHP:

$params['index'] = 'my_index';
$params['type']  = 'my_type';

$filter = array();
$filter['term']['my_field'] = 'abc';

$query = array();
$query['match']['my_other_field'] = 'xyz';

$params['body']['query']['filtered'] = array(
    "filter" => $filter,
    "query"  => $query
);

$results = $client->search($params);

​

For clarity and ease of readability, the filter and query sections were allocated individually as variables and then composed together later. This is often a good design pattern for applications, since it lets you treat the queries and filters as building blocks that can be passed around your application.

Of course, at the end of the day, it is built into a single array. You could easily build the entire array in one definition of nested array blocks, or build them line-by-line.

All the client requires is an associative array with a structure that matches the JSON query structure.