How to format a date to insert in Elasticsearch

Question

I'm coding a Java app to insert data in Elasticsearch 7.5.1. When creating the index the property was set like this:

"datetime":{
   "type":"date"            
}

Now when inserting the date I'm getting this error:

org.elasticsearch.index.mapper.MapperParsingException: failed to parse field [datetime] of type [date] in document with id '195'. Preview of field's value: '2018-11-23 10:38:00'

I'm currently doing it like this:

DateFormat dateFormat = new SimpleDateFormat("yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm:ss");
String v = dateFormat.format(date);

And checking a working index I can see it's formatted like this, example: 2019-10-09T11:11:38.879-04:00

What is the mask to create that format?

I recommend you don’t use SimpleDateFormat and Date. Those classes are poorly designed and long outdated, the former in particular notoriously troublesome. Instead use for example LocalDateTime and DateTimeFormatter, both from java.time, the modern Java date and time API. — Anonymous
– Anonymous, Commented Jan 15, 2020 at 6:11

ibexit · Accepted Answer · 2020-01-14 23:11:01Z

According to the docs, you can specify multiple date formats for your field "datetime".

The datetime from the error message above, 2018-11-23 10:38:00, needs to be mapped with yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm:ss in order to get indexed.

Please consider setting a timezone or even better use ISO 8601 format as elastic internally stores all dates as UTC. If you don't provide a Timezone, the datetime you are indexing will be assumed as UTC but your application may run in a different Timezone. This can cause trouble ;)

Back to the solution. Define the mapping like this for the datetime field:

PUT my_index
{
  "mappings": {
    "properties": {
      "datetime": {
        "type":   "date",
        "format": "yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm:ss||yyyy-MM-dd'T'HH:mm:ss.SSSZ||epoch_millis"
      }
    }
  }
}

And it will process datetime values like

2018-11-23 10:38:00 (your current format)
2001-07-04T12:08:56.235-0700 (ISO 8601)
1095379198 (unix time)

If you want more background information on date & time handling in java, have a look at this. Old, but gold.

Cheers!

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