Empty string in Elasticsearch date field?

Question

I have a date field setup in my mapping like this:

"groupsAssignedDate" : {
    "type" : "date",
    "format" : "MM-dd-YYYY"
}

In my app, the field groupsAssignedDate is set to the empty string initially. When a group is assigned, a unix timestamp is generated and stored in the field. I'm trying to use elasticsearch's bulk update function to bring in a bunch of documents with a groupsAssignedDate of "" because no groups have been assigned yet. Elasticsearch won't index the docs though. This is in the log file:

Failed to parse [groupsAssignedDate]
...
failed to parse date field [], tried both date format [MM-dd-YYYY], and timestamp number

It appears elasticsearch supports the JSON null value...do I need to switch my docs from using "" to null or is there some way I can support using the empty string instead?

Answer 1

Sounds like you may have answered this yourself. Just using null rather than "" in the date field should work.

If that's an issue, maybe consider this from
https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/reference/current/ignore-malformed.html#ignore-malformed-setting

The index.mapping.ignore_malformed global setting can be set on the index level to allow to ignore malformed content globally across all mapping types (malformed content example is trying to index a string value as a numeric type).

EDIT Edited the URL above to jump to the new information.

EDIT Edited the URL above again to jump to the new information.