Working with Field Alias
This topic discusses the field alias implementation and its impact on existing Kibana dashboards.
A field alias is a meaningful field label that is shown as the Attribute Display Name on the Map Search Attributes page (navigate to , and then select the Map Search Attributes tab).
For information on attribute display name, refer to Mapping Search Attributes.
Note: Field alias should be unique in a search definition. Duplicate field aliases within a search index are not copied to Elasticsearch or Kibana.
From PeopleTools 8.58.09, PeopleSoft Search Framework supports field aliases and technical field names, but from PeopleTools 8.59.13, PeopleSoft Search Framework supports only field aliases. That is, technical field names are not available when you create visualizations in Kibana. Therefore, when you access the existing dashboards, you may see errors, such as Field not found or Internal server error.
For details regarding support of aliases in different PeopleTools versions and PeopleSoft applications plans with respect to existing dashboards, refer to Using Field Aliases in Kibana Visualizations in PeopleTools 8.58.13/8.59.03 and Later (Doc ID 2787722.1).
ELK 7.10 DPK supports the field alias implementation in Kibana, so you must ensure that your PeopleSoft system is on the latest version of ELK 7.10 DPK. The ELK 7.10 DPK displays the field alias (and hides the technical field names) when you perform field selection for an index pattern, on visualizations and dashboards, and filter selection. However, the Discover page and saved searches in Kibana display the source fields from the Elasticsearch mapping and not the field alias. You should not use the Discover page to review fields.
Note: The ELK 7.10 DPK does not perform an automatic replacement of the technical field names with field aliases in the existing dashboards.
Considerations regarding PeopleSoft applications delivered dashboards:
PeopleSoft applications will re-deliver the existing (delivered) dashboards with alias-based implementation in subsequent update images. Refer to the Elasticsearch Home Page on My Oracle Support (Doc ID 2205540.2) for details.
When you copy the re-delivered dashboards to Kibana, Oracle PeopleSoft recommends deleting any existing metadata from old dashboards to avoid the presence of duplicate names.
The re-delivered dashboards are created using field aliases in English. Currently, PeopleSoft implementation of Kibana does not support multi language. If you want to use the multi-language fields, you can create new visualizations using the field names from the related language field aliases.
If you created visualizations (without using aliases), you should recreate these visualizations to avoid any errors.
Complete these steps to recreate a visualization:
If you copied the existing visualizations to the newly installed Kibana, you should delete the visualizations from the Saved Objects page (Stack Management > Saved Objects) to avoid any conflict with the recreated visualization.
Create a new Index Pattern by choosing the field alias for the date time field.
Create a new visualization. You can create a new visualization with the same name as the existing visualization.
Either create a new dashboard with the same name as the existing one or you can add the new visualization to the existing dashboard.
In the case of scripted fields, you should add a similar, but unique name for the field name, if an alias with the same name already exists. Field names are case sensitive in Kibana.
Import the new dashboards from Kibana to PeopleSoft.
For instructions on importing dashboards, see Importing a Dashboard.