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Keyword Datatype

A field to index structured content such as email addresses, hostnames, status codes, zip codes or tags.

They are typically used for filtering (Find me all blog posts where status is published), for sorting, and for aggregations. Keyword fields are only searchable by their exact value.

If you need to index full text content such as email bodies or product descriptions, it is likely that you should rather use a text field. By default every field in the document with text value is interpreted as type text so you must explicitly use keyword if you want a field not be text.

If you are following the documentation examples you may notice that the field “employer” is indexed as text before but this time we index the field as keyword

UPDATE /bank/1
{
  "username": {
    "_type": "keyword",
    "_value": "mlee"
  }
}

Caution
Notice we are using the same index “bank” as before, if you already indexed at this index with previous examples you are going to get a error for change types for the field “employer” from text to keyword

Parameters

The following parameters are accepted by Keyword fields:

_value	The value for the field. (Only used at index time).
_index	The mode the field will be indexed as: "none", "field_terms", "field_values", "field_all", "field", "global_terms", "global_values", "global_all", "global", "terms", "values", "all". (The default is "field_all").
_slot	The slot number. (It’s calculated by default).
_prefix	The prefix the term is going to be indexed with. (It’s calculated by default)
_weight	The weight the term is going to be indexed with.

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