No fixed type in indexing elasticsearch

Question

I am still learning elasticsearch. I wanted to know, if there is a way where the type of the value of a particular key is not fixed, can we still index it?

for example firstName can be "xyz" and it can also be an object in another document of the same type, and there is a huge combination of such fields which can all have string or object as the value, so it is not like I can isolate the string one and the object one in different indexes.

Thanks

orangejulius · Accepted Answer · 2018-10-17 19:23:28Z

1

Elasticsearch doesn't support this.

Elasticsearch does have features to "auto detect" what the type for a field should be. However, the first time it sees a field, it will make its guess, and then every subsequent record that has that field will have to match.

In your case, if a record where firstName was a string was indexed first, then all records where firstName is an object will throw an error when you try to index them in Elasticsearch. If an object was indexed first, all the records where firstName is a string would fail.

Elasticsearch is designed to help you get started quickly, but ultimately there's no shortcut and you will have to:

Design a schema that tells Elasticsearch good settings to use for each field
Do the work in your code that imports records into Elasticsearch to make decisions about how you want to import them

answered Oct 17, 2018 at 19:23

orangejulius

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1 Comment

Aakash Urvesh Thakkar Over a year ago

These are NoSQL schemas, and I believe I will have to run it through a value transformer to maintain the same type for each field.

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