Field name collisions when sorting

Daniel_Chang · August 19, 2015, 3:43pm

I am having a sorting issue where the documents returned are not respecting my sort criteria.
I am using Elasticsearch version 1.4.4

I have a field project.primary_site that is defined on two document types. In one (foobar-centric) project is defined as nested in the mappings, in the second one (donor-centric) project is just a regular object.

Doing a sort on donor-centric fails and it looked like the sort key is null.

{
  "sort": [
    {
      "project.primary_site": {
        "order": "asc"
      }
    }
  ]
}'

The gist below should illustrate this sorting problem, if I comment out the foobar-centric related curls, the sort works.

gist.github.com

https://gist.github.com/mwdchang/76f6b54811b36ecf79b8

sort.json

#!/bin/bash

SERVER="http://127.0.0.1:9200"

# Clean up
curl -XDELETE ${SERVER?}/dctest

# Create
curl -XPOST ${SERVER?}/dctest

This file has been truncated. show original

I am wondering if I am running into the Type Gotchas documented here
https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/guide/current/mapping.html#_avoiding_type_gotchas

If so, is the solution to just fully qualify the field names with the document type? i.e., instead of project.primary_site use donor-centric.project.primary_site and foobar-centric.project.primary_site?

Thanks,
Daniel

jpountz · August 21, 2015, 3:39pm

Indeed this is due to your types being mapped differently. Specifying the type name might work, but it would be much better to use different field names or different indices to avoid this issue.