Get Field Mapping

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 message only:

GET /twitter/_mapping/tweet/field/message

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

{
   "twitter": {
      "mappings": {
         "tweet": {
            "message": {
               "full_name": "message",
               "mapping": {
                  "message": {
                     "type": "text",
                     "fields": {
                        "keyword": {
                           "type": "keyword",
                           "ignore_above": 256
                        }
                     }
                  }
               }
            }
         }
      }
   }
}

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:

GET /twitter,kimchy/_mapping/field/message

GET /_all/_mapping/tweet,book/field/message,user.id

GET /_all/_mapping/tw*/field/*.id

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:

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

To select the id of the author field, you can use its full name author.id. name will return the field author.name:

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

returns:

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

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.