# Strings that can be interpreted as Date cause trouble even if mapped as text

**URL:** <https://discuss.elastic.co/t/strings-that-can-be-interpreted-as-date-cause-trouble-even-if-mapped-as-text/163881>\
**Category:** Elasticsearch\
**Created:** [January 11, 2019, 10:09am UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/strings-that-can-be-interpreted-as-date-cause-trouble-even-if-mapped-as-text/163881 "2019-01-11T10:09:44Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 3\
**Page:** 1

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![Sauter\_Vector](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/ecae2f/32.png) [@Sauter\_Vector](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/Sauter_Vector)\
**Post date:** [January 11, 2019, 10:09am UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/strings-that-can-be-interpreted-as-date-cause-trouble-even-if-mapped-as-text/163881/1 "2019-01-11T10:09:44Z")

</div>

Hello there,

we have an application which allows our customer to upload and index almost any data. We seem to have an issue, if we have a property whose type is "Text", but the input data can be interpreted as a datetime.

First of all, let me show you a part of our mapping, which was received via Kibana Get index/\_mappings:

```
 "fi@Date": {
   "type": "text",
   "fields": {
     "keyword": {
         "type": "keyword"
    }}}

```

fi@Date is our property and its type is text. Therefore any string can be used! Our index currently has 2 entries, which look like this (once again partially reduced):

```
    "_index": "cxcrgygrgemj9cjaofexlq_v1",
    "_source": {
      "filename": "DemoFile01",
      "fi@Date": "2018-10-31T08:25:52",

```

Second entry:

```
       "_index": "cxcrgygrgemj9cjaofexlq_v1",
        "_source": {
          "filename": "DemoFile02",
          "fi@Date": "Abc8-10-31T08:25:52"

```

Note that the first entry has **"fi@Date": "2018-10-31T08:25:52",**. The right hand side is a datetime representation, but the property fi@Date is defined as a text.

This causes currently two problems:

1. Using the NEST high level client, we create a request of type

2. Using the following query in Kibana causes an exception. The same happens with a QueryStringQuery in the NEST Client.

It gives  
"reason": "Failed to parse query [2018-10-31T08:25:52]",  
"reason": "Cannot parse '2018-10-31T08:25:52': Encountered " ":" ": "" at line 1, column 16.\r\nWas expecting one of:\r\n \r\n ...\r\n ...\r\n ...\r\n "+" ...\r\n "-" ...\r\n ...\r\n "(" ...\r\n "_" ...\r\n "^" ...\r\n ...\r\n ...\r\n \<FUZZY\_SLOP\> ...\r\n ...\r\n ...\r\n ...\r\n "[" ...\r\n "{" ...\r\n ...\r\n ",  
"caused\_by": {  
"type": "parse\_exception",  
"reason": "Encountered " ":" ": "" at line 1, column 16.\r\nWas expecting one of:\r\n \r\n ...\r\n ...\r\n ...\r\n "+" ...\r\n "-" ...\r\n ...\r\n "(" ...\r\n "_" ...\r\n "^" ...\r\n ...\r\n ...\r\n \<FUZZY\_SLOP\> ...\r\n ...\r\n ...\r\n ...\r\n "[" ...\r\n "{" ...\r\n ...\r\n "  
}  
Edit: There is no error, if we change slightly change the query, so it does no longer match a datetime e.g. "2018-10-31T08:2552" (removed colon). /Edit

Any ideas? Is this an ElasticSearch Bug? Can I do something to prevent both behaviours?

Version Info  
NEST 5.6.5  
[ElasticSearch.Net](http://ElasticSearch.Net) 5.6.5  
Elastic Search on Server 5.5

Kind regards,

Jörg

---

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![Sauter\_Vector](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/ecae2f/32.png) [@Sauter\_Vector](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/Sauter_Vector)\
**Post date:** [January 17, 2019, 11:53am UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/strings-that-can-be-interpreted-as-date-cause-trouble-even-if-mapped-as-text/163881/2 "2019-01-17T11:53:37Z")

</div>

I was able to narrow the first part down (automapping to DateTime object):  
It is default Json Behaviour to map any DateTime-ish string to a DateTime object.  
(Discussion around this can be found here: [https://github.com/JamesNK/Newtonsoft.Json/issues/862](https://github.com/JamesNK/Newtonsoft.Json/issues/862)).

In Json this can be fixed via Serializersettings. In Nest this would look like:

```
 mEsClientConnectionSettings = new ConnectionSettings(connectionPool, connection, new SerializerFactory((settings, values) =>
{
  settings.NullValueHandling = NullValueHandling.Ignore;
  settings.TypeNameHandling = TypeNameHandling.None;
  settings.DateParseHandling = DateParseHandling.None;
}));

```

However this does not help me. The Client still deserializes my string into a datetime object. I checked the specific client via Debugging and its serializersettings does have the **DateParseHandling = DateParseHandling.None;** set.

It does work in a small testprogram with NewtonSoft.Json:

```
JsonSerializerSettings settings = new JsonSerializerSettings
  {
    DateParseHandling = DateParseHandling.None
  };
  var obj = JsonConvert.DeserializeObject<Dictionary<string, Object>>("{\"MyKey\" : \"2018-10-31T08:25:52\"}", settings);

```

Any ideas how to fix this in Nest?

---

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![system](https://us1.discourse-cdn.com/elastic/original/3X/1/a/1ac57faf039f6b580b3f104ef42a2a89e41014de.png) [@system](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/system)\
**Post date:** [February 14, 2019, 11:53am UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/strings-that-can-be-interpreted-as-date-cause-trouble-even-if-mapped-as-text/163881/3 "2019-02-14T11:53:51Z")

</div>

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