Saving a dashboard with a now-based date causes a fatal error

[GrahamHannington]

Attempting to save a dashboard with a "now"-based date (for example, from:now-1w%2Fw) causes a fatal error:

Dashboard:
  Request to Elasticsearch failed:
  "MapperParsingException[failed to parse [timeTo]];
    nested: MapperParsingException[failed to parse date field [now],
      tried both date format [dateOptionalTime], and timestamp number with locale []];
    nested: IllegalArgumentException[Invalid format: \"now\"]; "

I'm using Kibana 4.1.0.

[rashidkpc]

So this appears to happen when an absolute dashboard is stored first, then a now-based (eg relative) one is later stored. Elasticsearch detects the field as a date instead of the string on the first dashboard, and locks the field to type 'date' forever more. As elasticsearch does not support relative dates in its date field, an exception is thrown.

We can create a fix for this, but it will require a re-index of your .kibana index .

[rashidkpc]

Ok, this was actually fixed in master here: #4509. Also fixed in 4.1.2