[7.5.0] Field mapped as a long appears as a string

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1

Hi there!

I'm experiencing a strange issue. I've got an index with a template where a given mapping is specified. Such a mapping includes a specific field which should be a long.

It works perfectly for almost all the documents in the index, but for some of them, even if the field acts as a long (I can do metric like avg and max over it), it does look like a string in the JSON.

Apparently it is causing some problems when another team queries ES via API, since the returned value is a string.

Here it is how the field appears (correctly) in most of the documents

image
image720×359 10.5 KB

Here it is how it appears in some documents
image

I even tried running a reindex on the original index, specifying again the mapping of that field, but result is the same.

Does anybody have any ideas about why it acts like that?

Thanks

2

The feature you may want to read about is called coerce and can be disabled.

Hope this helps!

--Alex

3

Mhmh interesting... shouldn't it be true by default anyway? :thinking:

However, thank you so much for your prompt and useful reply.
For anybody interested in fixing the same issue without reindexing with the coerce set to true, here's the ingest pipeline I used to update the index:

{
  "string_to_long_pipeline" : {
    "description" : "Convert a specific field from String to Long where needed",
    "processors" : [
      {
        "script" : {
          "source" : """
            if (ctx.containsKey('specific_field') && ctx.specific_field instanceof String) {
              def to_long = Long.parseLong(ctx.specific_field);
              ctx.specific_field = to_long
            }
          """
        }
      }
    ]
  }
}