Kibana support array of JSON object

[DravenJohnson]

We have a data that looks like this:

{
  "data1": "something",
  "data2":"something",
  "students": [{
     "name": "peter",
     "age": 9,
     "school": "school1"
    },
    {
      "name": "kevel",
      "age": 4,
      "school": "school2"
    }
  ]
}

An array of JSON object.

Based on the elasticsearch document, the nested object seems the only option we can use. However, looks like Kibana does not support that well, throwing a warning says "array of object is not well supported". We can't use query like students.age: 9 to get certain records.

Is there any other way to achieve the goal?

[thomasneirynck]

hi @DravenJohnson, I think you're running into a limitation of Kibana, https://github.com/elastic/kibana/issues/1084, it's a popular feature request.

[DravenJohnson]

Hi Thomas,

Thank you for the reply.

So there is no plan to support it? Do we have other option for this kind of data?

We need to be able to search / aggregate the field.

Thanks
Draven

[thomasneirynck]

There are plans to support it, but it hasn't been scheduled yet.

If you're just interested in building visualizations, you may be able to use the Vega-visualization (https://www.elastic.co/blog/custom-vega-visualizations-in-kibana). It allows you to put in a raw ES-query, rather than using the Kibana-UX for formulate your query. So you could query an index directly, working around the current Kibana limitation.

I actually haven't tested this, so YMMV, but it may be worth looking into.

[DravenJohnson]

Thanks Thomas