Accept 1 / 0 as true/false

[clintongormley]

Hiya

When you have boolean parameters, eg { "explain": true }, please could you accept any truthy value (eg 1) as for dynamic languages, the user has to go to great lengths to force a boolean true in JSON

thanks

clint

[kimchy]

In JSON there is a specific type for boolean, its funny that its hard to set it. So, how do you imaging this, as {"explain" : "1"} or {"explain" : 1}?

[clintongormley]

well, in dynamic languages that don't have a boolean type (eg Perl), false is

• 0
• undef / null
• ""
• "0"

and everything else is true.

Typically, we'd pass in 1 and 0 to represent true and false, but users could pass in anything. The one gotcha could be if they pass in 'true' or 'false', which would become "true" or "false", but at least in Perl users would be unlikely to do that.

[kimchy]

Ok, make sense. So, places where I parse the JSON and know what to expect, I can take care of that. But, how to you index a JSON document, are the boolean fields there used, or do you use numbers?

[clintongormley]

Hmm, that's an interesting one...

Typically, most Perl users would use 1 / 0 (so Int). The module I'm using to encode the JSON provides the facility to represent a real JSON 'true' or 'false' by using \1 or \0 (which actually means "a reference to the scalar value 1")

Are you able to convert truthy/falsey values to real boolean values when indexing a field mapped as type: "boolean" ? If so, you may not want to enable it by default, so that users of typed languages don't complain.

But allow dynamic languages to pass a flag, perhaps?

And I'd put a a big GOTCHA warning in my docs explaining the need to use mappings before indexing.

[kimchy]

I do perform optimization when it comes to boolean fields. People can use 1 and 0, but they will be treated automatically as numbers when not explicitly defined in mapping. Even when explicitly defined in the mappings as boolean, only a boolean type is supported. I will add support for numbers as well.

[kimchy]

Opened #33 for the boolean type in JSON documents indexed.

[kimchy]

Accept also 0 int number to indicate false, and any other number to indicate true (on top of accepting json boolean type), closed by 3f045de.

[JoranDox]

Has this been intentionally reverted? It seems according to https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/reference/current/boolean.html and experimentally walking into it, that boolean type doesn't support 0 and 1 anymore.