Fielddata is disabled on text fields by default

Elastic Stack Elasticsearch
1

So consider the following:

Fielddata is disabled on text fields by default. Set fielddata=true on
[your_field_name] in order to load fielddata in memory by uninverting the
inverted index. Note that this can however use significant memory.

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reading https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/reference/current/fielddata.html#fielddata tells me there's some alterations that need to be made to the fielddata(text) in order for the documents to be searchable on a specific term.

Issue i can't get my head around is, if i have multiple indexes and multiple " Fielddata is disabled on text fields by default" issues on a variety of fields, how can i get this resolved going forward?

Do i have to use something like this:

PUT your_index/_mapping/your_type
{
"your_type": {
"properties": {
"publisher": {
"type": "text",
"fielddata": true
}
}
}
}

on every affected field? in every index in every mapping?

is there not a way of affecting this change wholesale? i mean, if it means i have to wipe out my indexes and start again make the change and going forward the issue is resolved, thats fine, or can i make a change and make it effective on existing indexes ?

and how will this affect heap usage, i read that switching this on to get around this error uses a lot of heap space, so making this change seems counter to efficient use.

2

You should use the keyword data type instead.

3

is that something i can use wholesale like

PUT o365beat*/_mapping/your_type
{
"your_type": {
"properties": {
"publisher": {
"type": "data",
"fielddata": true
}
}
}
}

and what value would your_type be ?

4

ahhhh ok.. i don't have a dedicated template for this data... does this mean i could affect a change by using a dedicated template for this index type ? my o365beat input, i could use a template to make these multiple field types from text to data?

5

Yes. You will have to drop the index and reindex though.