Can I ignore "failed to find nested object under path" in ElasticSearch if I get results? - elasticsearch

Question

We have an index with mapping that includes nested fields. In our Java class these fields are lists of objects, and sometimes the lists can be empty (so in the json structure we get e.g {... "some_nested_field": [], ...}.
When we run a query we do get results as expected, but also an error:
"failures": [
{
"shard": 0,
"index": ".kibana",
"node": "ZoEuUdkORpuBSNs7gqiv1Q",
"reason": {
"type": "query_shard_exception",
"reason": """
failed to create query: {
"nested" : {
"query" : {
"bool" : {
"must" : [
{
"match" : {
"foobar.name" : {
"query" : "brlo",
"operator" : "OR",
"prefix_length" : 0,
"max_expansions" : 50,
"fuzzy_transpositions" : true,
"lenient" : false,
"zero_terms_query" : "NONE",
"auto_generate_synonyms_phrase_query" : true,
"boost" : 1.0
}
}
}
],
"adjust_pure_negative" : true,
"boost" : 1.0
}
},
"path" : "foobar",
"ignore_unmapped" : false,
"score_mode" : "avg",
"boost" : 1.0
}
}
""",
"index_uuid": "xrFCunLNSv6AER_KwNMHSA",
"index": ".kibana",
"caused_by": {
"type": "illegal_state_exception",
"reason": "[nested] failed to find nested object under path [foobar]"
}
}
}
Can I assume that this error is caused by records with empty lists, and ignore it? Or does this indicate an internal error and possibly missing results from my query? Is there a way to avoid this error?
UPDATE:
This is an example of the query we're executing:
GET /_search
{
"query": {
"nested": {
"path": "mynested",
"query": {
"bool": {
"should" : [
{ "match" : { "mynested.name": "foo" } },
{ "match" : { "mynested.description": "bar" } },
{ "match" : { "mynested.category": "baz" } }
],
"minimum_should_match" : 1
}
}
}
}
}
The response from ES reports 10 successful shards and one failure:
{
"took": 889,
"timed_out": false,
"_shards": {
"total": 11,
"successful": 10,
"skipped": 0,
"failed": 1,
"failures": [...]
And we do get hits back:
"hits": {
"total": 234450,
"max_score": 11.092936,
"hits": [ ...

Answer 1

Looks like you have Kibana installed. In the error message it says that it can't find nested under path foobar of index .kibana, which is the one that Kibana uses:
"index_uuid": "xrFCunLNSv6AER_KwNMHSA",
"index": ".kibana",
"caused_by": {
"type": "illegal_state_exception",
"reason": "[nested] failed to find nested object under path [foobar]"
}
When doing simple GET /_search all Elasticsearch indexes are queried, also .kibana, which is probably not what you wanted.
To ignore this particular index you can use Multiple Indices search capability and do a query like:
GET /*,-.kibana/_search
Hope that helps!