Abstract temporal searches in Elasticsearch - date

Question

I'm having trouble wrapping my head around the best way to solve this and could use some outside opinions. In my ES data, I have news articles from the past ~100 years. I'm trying to figure out the best way to search for articles by attributes of a date, not a date range. Here are some for-instances:
Get articles "on this day", e.g. April 15, regardless of year.
Search for articles written between specific hours, e.g. 9am-5pm, or days of the week e.g. Saturdays and Sundays.
Search for articles written during June, July, and August (again, regardless of year).
... and so on. The best solution I've come up with is to store these attributes separately in the index, e.g.
{
"publish_date": {
"full": "2014-04-15 12:34:56",
"year": 2014,
"month": 4,
"monthname": "april",
"day": 15,
"dayofweek": "tuesday",
"dayofyear": 105,
"hour": 12,
"minute": 34,
"second": 56,
"week": 16
}
}
I'm not happy with this solution and I want to break up with it.
Any thoughts on what you would do differently, or how you'd solve this problem?
Thanks!

Answer 1

first off, why aren't you happy with it? It's perfectly fine and in-line with the 'denormalization' hat you probably need to start wearing when doing document-modeling in ES (and other denormalized / nosql databases)
Having said that, you don't need to write the different fields in your own indexing-code. Instead you could go for:
using multi-fields, which allows 1 input field to be indexed to multiple ES-fields, each with there own mapping. http://www.elasticsearch.org/guide/en/elasticsearch/reference/current/mapping-core-types.html#_multi_fields_3
define such a ES-field for each date-mapping you want to do: http://www.elasticsearch.org/guide/en/elasticsearch/reference/current/mapping-date-format.html