Make controls drop down case-insensitive

[AlonaNadler]

Input controls are very popular since it provides users easy way to filter and interact with their data. One of the problems is that they need to know exactly how the values are written to find them in the input controls.

When using a Kibana control (Experimental) in a high cardinality field the control gives you only the keyword field i.e. email.keyword and you need to type in the exact case (since it's keyword it needs to be an exact match). This is not a problem with low cardinality fields as they are pre-populated in the dropdown but it is for high cardinality fields. For instance, typing in [email protected] won't show [email protected] in the dropdown.
This means the user needs to know in advance the case while typing in which is not very practical.

Another result of this problem introduce a nagging doubt into the mind of a user: why can't I find my data?

The question then becomes, if I can find it here, where else cant I find the data I’m looking for.

Solution: By default make controls drop-down case-insensitive

[elasticmachine]

Pinging @elastic/kibana-app (Team:KibanaApp)

[timroes]

We discussed this, and there is simply technically no way of solving that really. The way data is indexed in ElasticSearch highly influences the way how querying and filtering works on them, and there is a level of knowledge users will need, that we cannot abstract away in Kibana. But luckily ElasticSearch usually offers configuration that allows abstracting those away.

If you want to support case-insensitive search on a field, you can apply a lowercase token filter to a field, which will cause the field to be tokenized lowercase, and the same lowercase will be applied to a query and thus it will search case-insensitive. This is the correct way to have case-insensitive search in Elasticsearch.

If a field doesn't use that, we cannot force case-insensitive querying/filtering later on that. Thus closing this, with providing the solution for how to address that issue.