# Cannot display string in a visualization table of more than 256 letters

**URL:** https://discuss.elastic.co/t/cannot-display-string-in-a-visualization-table-of-more-than-256-letters/218890
**Category:** Kibana
**Created:** [February 12, 2020, 4:12am UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/cannot-display-string-in-a-visualization-table-of-more-than-256-letters/218890 "2020-02-12T04:12:30Z")
**Posts on this page:** 1
**Showing post:** 2

<div class="post-metadata">

### Author: ![flash1293](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/elastic/user_avatar/discuss.elastic.co/flash1293/32/41227_2.png) [@flash1293](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/flash1293)
#### Post date: [February 12, 2020, 11:45am UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/cannot-display-string-in-a-visualization-table-of-more-than-256-letters/218890/2 "2020-02-12T11:45:16Z")

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Hi @reyhanadp,

Discover shows the `source` of a document - this is the JSON as it looked like when the document got ingested in Elasticsearch.

Visualizations (as the table visualization) however work differently - they are using aggregations to fetch data which relies on the indexed values of the fields, not the raw contents during ingestion. In your case `Message` is probably a keyword field with a length of 256. You can confirm this by looking up your mapping:

```auto
GET /kibana_sample_data_logs/_mapping/field/extension.keyword

{
  "kibana_sample_data_logs" : {
    "mappings" : {
      "extension.keyword" : {
        "full_name" : "extension.keyword",
        "mapping" : {
          "keyword" : {
            "type" : "keyword",
            "ignore_above" : 256
          }
        }
      }
    }
  }
}

```

In this example the `extension.keyword` field has an `ignore_above` property of 256 which means everything after the 256th character won't be indexed and thus is not known to the table visualization.

You could try to increase that limit and re-index your data, but your case looks like you want to show individual documents in a table format on a dashboard. The "table" visualization is not the right tool for this, you can configure the columns you want to see in Discover and save it as a "Saved search". Then you can add this saved search to the dashboard and it won't have the character limit issue as it will use the `source` object just like Discover. [https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/kibana/current/save-open-search.html](https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/kibana/current/save-open-search.html)

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_[View the full topic](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/cannot-display-string-in-a-visualization-table-of-more-than-256-letters/218890)._