Get Field Mapping

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The get field mapping API allows you to retrieve mapping definitions for one or more fields. This is useful when you do not need the complete type mapping returned by the Get Mapping API.

The following returns the mapping of the field text only:

curl -XGET 'http://localhost:9200/twitter/_mapping/tweet/field/text'

For which the response is (assuming text is a default string field):

{
   "twitter": {
      "tweet": {
         "text": {
            "full_name": "text",
            "mapping": {
               "text": { "type": "string" }
            }
         }
      }
   }
}

Multiple Indices, Types and Fields

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The get field mapping API can be used to get the mapping of multiple fields from more than one index or type with a single call. General usage of the API follows the following syntax: host:port/{index}/{type}/_mapping/field/{field} where {index}, {type} and {field} can stand for comma-separated list of names or wild cards. To get mappings for all indices you can use _all for {index}. The following are some examples:

curl -XGET 'http://localhost:9200/twitter,kimchy/_mapping/field/message'

curl -XGET 'http://localhost:9200/_all/_mapping/tweet,book/field/message,user.id'

curl -XGET 'http://localhost:9200/_all/_mapping/tw*/field/*.id'

Specifying fields

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The get mapping api allows you to specify one or more fields separated with by a comma. You can also use wildcards. The field names can be any of the following:

Full names

the full path, including any parent object name the field is part of (ex. user.id).

Index names

the name of the lucene field (can be different than the field name if the index_name option of the mapping is used).

Field names

the name of the field without the path to it (ex. id for { "user" : { "id" : 1 } }).

The above options are specified in the order the field parameter is resolved. The first field found which matches is returned. This is especially important if index names or field names are used as those can be ambiguous.

For example, consider the following mapping:

 {
     "article": {
         "properties": {
             "id": { "type": "string" },
             "title":  { "type": "string", "index_name": "text" },
             "abstract": { "type": "string", "index_name": "text" },
             "author": {
                 "properties": {
                     "id": { "type": "string" },
                     "name": { "type": "string", "index_name": "author" }
                 }
             }
         }
     }
 }

To select the id of the author field, you can use its full name author.id. Using text will return the mapping of abstract as it is one of the fields which map to the Lucene field text. name will return the field author.name:

curl -XGET "http://localhost:9200/publications/_mapping/article/field/author.id,text,name"

returns:

{
   "publications": {
      "article": {
         "text": {
            "full_name": "abstract",
            "mapping": {
               "abstract": { "type": "string", "index_name": "text" }
            }
         },
         "author.id": {
            "full_name": "author.id",
            "mapping": {
               "id": { "type": "string" }
            }
         },
         "name": {
            "full_name": "author.name",
            "mapping": {
               "name": { "type": "string", "index_name": "author" }
            }
         }
      }
   }
}

Note how the response always use the same fields specified in the request as keys. The full_name in every entry contains the full name of the field whose mapping were returned. This is useful when the request can refer to to multiple fields (like text above).

Other options

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include_defaults

adding include_defaults=true to the query string will cause the response to include default values, which are normally suppressed.