# "cannot read property of undefined" and "shards failed"

**URL:** https://discuss.elastic.co/t/cannot-read-property-of-undefined-and-shards-failed/166385
**Category:** Kibana
**Created:** [January 30, 2019, 3:16pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/cannot-read-property-of-undefined-and-shards-failed/166385 "2019-01-30T15:16:52Z")
**Posts on this page:** 4
**Page:** 1

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### Author: ![goochjs](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/elastic/user_avatar/discuss.elastic.co/goochjs/32/32587_2.png) [@goochjs](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/goochjs)
#### Post date: [January 30, 2019, 3:16pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/cannot-read-property-of-undefined-and-shards-failed/166385/1 "2019-01-30T15:16:52Z")

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Hi,

We've started seeing some errors when searching Kibana. I think the cases are related to where the team have been looking for middleware message IDs, which contain colons. Is this the cause?

 ![kibana-search-errror](https://us1.discourse-cdn.com/elastic/original/3X/8/2/8201d56ae8fb42cbb1b83142c3dc5edc0dae7973.png)

We're running v6.4.2.

Thanks,

J.

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### Author: ![thomasneirynck](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/elastic/user_avatar/discuss.elastic.co/thomasneirynck/32/23313_2.png) [@thomasneirynck](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/thomasneirynck)
#### Post date: [January 30, 2019, 10:19pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/cannot-read-property-of-undefined-and-shards-failed/166385/2 "2019-01-30T22:19:17Z")

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can they quote the values of the search query?

in the lucene query syntax, the colon is used to separate the field-name from the query-string value.

something like: `ID:"277032:12341:14431..."`

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<div class="post-metadata">

### Author: ![goochjs](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/elastic/user_avatar/discuss.elastic.co/goochjs/32/32587_2.png) [@goochjs](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/goochjs)
#### Post date: [January 31, 2019, 9:26am UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/cannot-read-property-of-undefined-and-shards-failed/166385/3 "2019-01-31T09:26:23Z")

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Thanks - that's the advice I've given, on the assumption (which you've confirmed) that colon is a reserved character. I logged it here because the error messages are unexpectedly severe and there was concern that something else was awry.

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### Author: ![system](https://us1.discourse-cdn.com/elastic/original/3X/1/a/1ac57faf039f6b580b3f104ef42a2a89e41014de.png) [@system](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/system)
#### Post date: [February 28, 2019, 9:26am UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/cannot-read-property-of-undefined-and-shards-failed/166385/4 "2019-02-28T09:26:24Z")

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