How to update a field type in elasticsearch

Question

The ElasticSearch documents just aren't clear on how to do this.

I indexed some tweets, and one of the fields, created_at, indexed as a string instead of a date. I can't find how to reindex with this change via a curl call. If reindexing is a complicated process, then I would much rather just delete what's there and start over. But, I can't find how to specify the field types either!

Any help is greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

You need to define a mapping using Put Mapping API.

curl -XPUT 'http://localhost:9200/twitter/_doc/_mapping' -H 'Content-Type: application/json'  -d ' {     "_doc" : {         "properties" : {             "message" : {"type" : "text", "store" : true}         }     } } ' 

A date can be defined as follow:

curl -XPUT 'http://localhost:9200/twitter/_doc/_mapping' -H 'Content-Type: application/json'  -d ' {     "_doc" : {         "properties" : {             "user" : {"type" : "keyword", "null_value" : "na"},             "message" : {"type" : "text"},             "postDate" : {"type" : "date"},             "priority" : {"type" : "integer"},             "rank" : {"type" : "float"}         }     } } ' 

Answer 2

You also need to specify format not just type if you are inserting a mysql timestamp then you should just add a format to it like this.

"properties": {     "updated_at": {          "type": "date",          "format": "yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm:ss"      }  } 

If we consider your example then it should be like

"tweet" : {     "properties" : {         "user" : {"type" : "string", "index" : "not_analyzed"},         "message" : {"type" : "string", "null_value" : "na"},         "postDate" : {"type" : "date" , "format": "yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm:ss" },         "priority" : {"type" : "integer"},         "rank" : {"type" : "float"}     } }