Can I use parent-child relationships on Kibana?

Question

On a relational DB, I have two tables connected by a foreign key, on a typical one-to-many relationship. I would like to translate this schema into ElasticSearch, so I researched and found two options: the nested and parent-child. My ultimate goal was to visualize this dataset in Kibana 4.

Parent-child seemed the most adequate one, so I'll describe the steps that I followed, based on the official ES documentation and a few examples I found on the web.

 curl  -XPUT http://server:port/accident_struct -d '
{
 "mappings" : {
  "event" : {
  },
  "details": {
      "_parent": {
        "type": "event" 
      } ,
   "properties" : {       
 }  
  }
 }
}
';

here I create the index accident_struct, which contains two types (corresponding to the two relational tables): event and details.

Event is the parent, thus each document of details has an event associated to it.

Then I upload the documents using the bulk API. For event:

{"index":{"_index":"accident_struct","_type":"event","_id":"17f14c32-53ca-4671-b959-cf47e81cf55c"}}
{values here...}

And for details:

{"index":{"_index":"accident_struct","_type":"details","_id": "1", "_parent": "039c7e18-a24f-402d-b2c8-e5d36b8ad220" }}

The event does not know anything about children, but each child (details) needs to set its parent. In the ES documentation I see the parent being set using "parent", while in other examples I see it using "_parent". I wonder what is the correct option (although at this point, none works for me).

The requests are successfully completed and I can see that the number of documents contained in the index corresponds to the sum of events + types.

I can also query parents for children and children for parents, on ES. For example:

curl -XPOST host:port/accident_struct/details/_search?pretty -d '{
    "query" : {
        "has_parent" : {
            "type" : "event",
                "query" : {
                    "match_all" : {}
                }
        }
    }
}'

After setting the index on Kibana, I am able to list all the fields from parent and child. However, if I go to the "discover" tab, only the parent fields are listed.

If I uncheck a box that reads "hide missing fields", the fields from the child documents are shown as grey out, along with an error message (see image)

Am I doing something wrong or is the parent-child not supported in Kibana4? And if it is not supported, what would be the best alternative to represent this type of relationship?

Answer 1

Per the comment in this discussion on the elastic site, P/C is, like nested objects, at least not supported in visualizations. Le sigh.