ignore_malformed

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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": {
    "my_type": {
      "properties": {
        "number_one": {
          "type": "integer"
        },
        "number_two": {
          "type": "integer",
          "ignore_malformed": true
        }
      }
    }
  }
}

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

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

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

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

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

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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": {
    "my_type": {
      "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.