Overview

This addresses the situation where a client attempts to write a document to the Search Data Service and specifies an index that has not previously been created in the document store.

The current default behaviour of the ElasticSearch back end that the Search Data Service currently uses is for the document store to implicitly create the missing index, inferring the required fields and settings from the structure of the document being written.

This has the unfortunate effect of masking the fact that the requested index was not previously created and often results in analyzer settings that are different than what the client expects.  This manifests in unexpected behaviour down the road when clients attempt to query the data that they have written to the document store and can be difficult to debug.

Solution

The behaviour of the Search Data Service is to be changed so that if a document create or update is attempted against an index that does not exist, the request will be rejected with a 404 Not Found error.

The client can then handle this in whatever manner is most appropriate (probably fall back to explicitly create the index, then retry it's document create/update).