Question

This might be something really peculiar I’m trying to do. I’m running a “river” to dynamically index all data in my couchdb.
As multiple users enter data into the system, sometimes there is a conflict in mapping (MapperParser Error). For example:

• userA adds the following data – {"tweet" : {"fooval" : "1"}}
  — elasticSearch creates a Mapping for this tweet.fooval variable as Number (as it interprets it as a number)
• userB adds the following data – {"tweet" : {"fooval" : "false"}}
  — elasticSearch tries to create a Mapping for this tweet.fooval variable as Boolean (as it interprets it as a Boolean) and hence a MapperParser Error.

I guess you see the problem. Also I only want to do it at the level of scalar types, as I don’t want Arrays/Objects to be treated as strings. I want all scalar types to be treated as Strings while the mapping is being created.

I couldn’t find anything on the doc page, or on the forum, so thought will ask here for directions/pointers.

Answer 1

First of all, by default, elasticsearch is not parsing strings. So, if you will pass to elasticsearch the following JSON: {"tweet": {"fooval": "1"}} it will treat tweet.fooval as a string. If elaticsearch is parsing strings, make sure that numeric_detection and date_detection are set to false in the mapping.

On the other side, if elasticsearch receives a value as a JSON number like this: {"tweet": {"fooval": 1}}, elasticsearch will indeed map such field as long or double. You can override this behavior by using dynamic_templates. Here is an example:

curl -XPUT localhost:9200/test-idx -d '{
    "settings": {
        "index.number_of_replicas": 0,
        "index.number_of_shards": 1
    },
    "mappings": {
        "doc": {
            "dynamic_templates" : [
                {
                    "template_obj" : {
                        "match" : "*",
                        "match_mapping_type" : "object",
                        "mapping" : {
                            "type" : "object"
                        }
                    }
                },
                {
                    "template_str" : {
                        "match" : "*",
                        "mapping" : {
                            "type" : "string"
                        }
                    }
                }            
            ]
        }
    }
}'
curl -XPUT localhost:9200/test-idx/doc/1 -d '{
    "count": 123,
    "sold": false,
    "date": "2009-11-15T14:12:12",
    "price": 12.3,
    "description": {
        "weight":  42.3,
        "size": {
            "lenght": 30,
            "width": 20,
            "hight": 10
        }
    }
}'
echo
curl "localhost:9200/test-idx/doc/_mapping?pretty=true"