Object field type

JSON documents are hierarchical in nature: the document may contain inner objects which, in turn, may contain inner objects themselves:

PUT my-index-000001/_doc/1
{ 
  "region": "US",
  "manager": { 
    "age":     30,
    "name": { 
      "first": "John",
      "last":  "Smith"
    }
  }
}

Internally, this document is indexed as a simple, flat list of key-value pairs, something like this:

{
  "region":             "US",
  "manager.age":        30,
  "manager.name.first": "John",
  "manager.name.last":  "Smith"
}

An explicit mapping for the above document could look like this:

PUT my-index-000001
{
  "mappings": {
    "properties": { 
      "region": {
        "type": "keyword"
      },
      "manager": { 
        "properties": {
          "age":  { "type": "integer" },
          "name": { 
            "properties": {
              "first": { "type": "text" },
              "last":  { "type": "text" }
            }
          }
        }
      }
    }
  }
}

You are not required to set the field type to object explicitly, as this is the default value.

Parameters for object fields

The following parameters are accepted by object fields:

If you need to index arrays of objects instead of single objects, read Nested first.