Integer field behaving as string

[wissam]

Hi,
I'm facing a weird problem with field types in Elasticsearch (7.5.3).

I have a field of type "integer" (explicitly mapped), but every time I try to update it via a painless script by doing ctx._source.myfield += 1, a '1' is concatenated to the field instead of incrementing it by 1, and after multiple updates I'm getting this error:

[400] [mapper_parsing_exception] failed to parse field [myfield] of type [integer] in document with id 'xxxx'. Preview of field's value: '8311111111'

I looked up this record and found that the current value of myfield=831111111, so it's trying to concatenate another '1' and projecting the new value to become '8311111111' which doesn't fit the integer type

I did a workaround for now by changing the script to do the following, and it worked:
if (ctx._source.myfield instanceof String) { ctx._source.myfield = Integer.parseInt(ctx._source.myfield)+1 } else {ctx._source.myfield += 1 }

But I would like to know why/how did this happen?

Please also note that this is not happening with all the records in the index.

Thx

[aaron-nimocks]

I can't find += in the list of operators that painless uses (even though it worked on my test I just did). Which makes this even more confusing. I'd think it would throw an error for using it.

Have you just tried ctx._source.myfield ++ or ctx._source.myfield + 1 which should increment the number by 1?

[wissam]

Yes I tried both ctx._source.myfield ++ and ctx._source.myfield + 1 with the same result.

However I did some more testing to see when this is happening and when not, and found the following:

• as I mentioned before, myfield is already explicitly mapped as integer

• when I insert a new record with myfield as a string (put test/_doc/1 {"myfield":"42"}}) , it is saved normally without any errors.

• now when I update the above record (post test/_update/1 {"script":{"source":"ctx._source.myfield ++"}}) a 1 is concatenated and myfield becomes 421

• when I insert a new record with myfield as an integer (put test/_doc/2 {"myfield":42}}) everything works fine

So it looks like when a string value is inserted in a field of type integer, it's being internally treated as a string in some functions and as an integer in others?