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Empty fields?

The topic of empty-ish fields comes up often because:

input fields weren't required and were skipped (e.g. optional input fields in signup forms)

because of human error (e.g. data entry "interns" forgot to fill out a form field)

and last but not least, because of purposefully set empty-ish values (null, [], {}, "")

Disambiguation

Existent Fields

In Elasticsearch, these values would indicate that a given field does exist:

Empty strings, such as "" or "-"

Arrays containing null and another value, such as [null, "foo"]

A custom null-value, defined in field mapping (discussed later on)

Non-Existent Fields

When a doc is inserted into ES, its fields are usually indexed. The indexed value of one of those fields may not exist due to a variety of reasons:

The field is simply not present in the source JSON

The field in the source JSON is null — null or [] or [null, null, ...?] or {}

The field has "index" : false set in the mapping

The field value was malformed and the ignore_malformed parameter was defined in the index mapping

These statements might still be confusing so let's look at a concrete example.

Use case: Detecting Absent Fields

Given the following documents that contain different data types, any of which can be emptyish or even absent (non-existent):

POST myindex/_doc/1
{
	"id": 1
                                  
}

POST myindex/_doc/2
{  
	"id": 2,
  "potentially_absent_field": null
}

POST myindex/_doc/3
{
	"id": 3,
  "potentially_absent_field": 123
}

I want to find documents that strictly lack the potentially_absent_field, i.e. only doc#1.

Approaches

At the first glance it looks like we could reverse the exists query and thus target only those docs that do not contain the potentially_absent_field:

POST myindex/_search
{
  "query": {
    "bool": {
      "must_not": [
        {
          "exists": {
            "field": "potentially_absent_field"
          }
        }
      ]
    }
  }
}

Missing vs. Empty Fields