Elasticsearch : "birthday" exception - elasticsearch

Question

This is my document:
{
"user" : {
"name" : "test",
"birthday" : "123"
}
}
when I post this to elasticsearch , it went wrong:
"type" : "mapper_parsing_exception",
"reason" : "object mapping for [user.birthday] tried to parse field [birthday] as object, but found a concrete value"
But if I changed it to this:
{
"user" : {
"name" : "test",
"birthay" : "123"
}
}
It went well.
Is the birthday a keyword ? What can I do for it ?

Answer 1

It's a problem with your mapping. I suppose your birthday is a date, like below:
{
"properties": {
"name": {
"type": "string",
"index": "not_analyzed"
},
"birthday": {
"type": "date",
"format": "yyyy-MM-dd"
}
}
}

Answer 2

I imagine your mapping looks something like this:
{
"properties": {
"name": {
"type": "string",
"index": "not_analyzed"
},
"birthday": {
"type": "object",
"properties" : {
"date" : {"type" : "string"}
}
"index": "not_analyzed"
}
}
}
Or at least something similar that sets the birthday field to be an object type. Your mapping actually needs to be as follows:
{
"properties": {
"name": {
"type": "string",
"index": "not_analyzed"
},
"birthday": {
"type": "date",
"format": "YYYY-MM-dd",
"index": "not_analyzed"
}
}
}
And the reason that setting the document field name to 'birthay' instead of 'birthday' worked is that if you don't have a type mapping set for a field Elasticsearch tries to determine one that fits best dynamically.
It's also worth noting that if you don't have a mapping defined and you're getting this error it might be because a document you're indexing before the document that fails has something other than a string format date as the birthday. Thsi would cause ES to determine the field type as something else and then fail on other documents.