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Elasticsearch Reference [7.0] » Mapping » Mapping parameters » ignore_malformed
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ignore_malformed

Sometimes you don’t have much control over the data that you receive. One user may send a login field that is a date, and another sends a login field that is an email address.

Trying to index the wrong datatype into a field throws an exception by default, and rejects the whole document. The ignore_malformed parameter, if set to true, allows the exception to be ignored. The malformed field is not indexed, but other fields in the document are processed normally.

For example:

PUT my_index
{
  "mappings": {
    "properties": {
      "number_one": {
        "type": "integer",
        "ignore_malformed": true
      },
      "number_two": {
        "type": "integer"
      }
    }
  }
}

PUT my_index/_doc/1
{
  "text":       "Some text value",
  "number_one": "foo" 
}

PUT my_index/_doc/2
{
  "text":       "Some text value",
  "number_two": "foo" 
}

This document will have the text field indexed, but not the number_one field.

This document will be rejected because number_two does not allow malformed values.

Tip

The ignore_malformed setting is allowed to have different settings for fields of the same name in the same index. Its value can be updated on existing fields using the PUT mapping API.

Index-level default

The index.mapping.ignore_malformed setting can be set on the index level to allow to ignore malformed content globally across all mapping types.

PUT my_index
{
  "settings": {
    "index.mapping.ignore_malformed": true 
  },
  "mappings": {
    "properties": {
      "number_one": { 
        "type": "byte"
      },
      "number_two": {
        "type": "integer",
        "ignore_malformed": false 
      }
    }
  }
}

The number_one field inherits the index-level setting.

The number_two field overrides the index-level setting to turn off ignore_malformed.

Dealing with malformed fields

Malformed fields are silently ignored at indexing time when ignore_malformed is turned on. Whenever possible it is recommended to keep the number of documents that have a malformed field contained, or queries on this field will become meaningless. Elasticsearch makes it easy to check how many documents have malformed fields by using exist or term queries on the special _ignored field.

Limits for JSON Objects

You can’t use ignore_malformed with the following datatypes:

You also can’t use ignore_malformed to ignore JSON objects submitted to fields of the wrong datatype. A JSON object is any data surrounded by curly brackets "{}" and includes data mapped to the nested, object, and range datatypes.

If you submit a JSON object to an unsupported field, Elasticsearch will return an error and reject the entire document regardless of the ignore_malformed setting.

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