TSVB Table view not picking up multi-field mapping properly

[benji87 (Ben)]

Hi all,

I have a date field that uses the standard format of MMM D, YYYY @ HH:mm:ss.SSS

I also wanted a simplified version of this field that only includes the date and drops the time, so I created a new multi-field mapping using the following API command -

PUT /entity-dwells/_mapping
{
  "properties": {
    "dwell_start": {
      "type": "date",
      "fields": {
        "simpledate": {
          "type": "date"
        }
      }
    }
  }
}

I then configured the 'simpledate' field to be a custom format in Kibana index configuration -

This appears to have worked, and when viewing documents in discover, I can now see the new multi-field in the simplified format -

I'm now creating a new Time series visualisation in Kibana that utilises the 'simpledate' field. As you can see in this screenshot, I've been able to select the index, and then select the simpledate field as the timefield. I'm using an Average aggregation on another numerical field, and the time series appears to display correctly -

However, the issue occurs when I try and use the Table tab of TSVB. Firstly, as required, I select the simpledate field as the group by field. I would have expected TSVB to group by each date, as all documents in the simpledate field are date only. However, it's grouping them by date-time for some reason -

As you can see in my example, I would have expected May 1, 2020 to be the first line, then May 2, 2020 and so on.

Interestingly, the table result is identical to when I select the simpledate fields parent index mapping as the group by field, suggesting the simpledate fields format is not being applied properly in the table view -

Does the TSVB table view support grouping by multi-fields?

Thanks in advance!

[wylie (Wylie Conlon)]

Hi, I think you might be approaching this problem the wrong way for multiple reasons. It looks like you are trying to get a table that shows the "Average per day", with labels formatted to show the day name. You can do this by using the Date histogram aggregation in a Lens data table or Visualize data table, but you can't do this in TSVB.

The main thing that is not correct about what you've shown is that you don't need multi-mapped fields to group dates together in Kibana. Secondly, the way you've set up your multi-mapping is that you have two identical copies of the dates, in milliseconds, in Elasticsearch. To have different data stored in Elasticsearch you would need to ingest it differently. Finally, the Kibana field format that you've chosen is not changing the underlying data- it's purely used for presentation.