OpenSearch/x-pack/docs/en/watcher/actions/index.asciidoc

[role="xpack"]
[[actions-index]]
=== Index action

Use the `index` action to index data into Elasticsearch.
See <<index-action-attributes>> for the supported attributes.

==== Configuring index actions

The following snippet shows a simple `index` action definition:

[source,js]
--------------------------------------------------
"actions" : {
  "index_payload" : { <1>
    "condition": { ... }, <2>
    "transform": { ... }, <3>
    "index" : {
      "index" : "my-index", <4>
      "doc_id": "my-id" <5>
    }
  }
}
--------------------------------------------------
// NOTCONSOLE
<1> The id of the action
<2> An optional <<condition,condition>> to restrict action execution
<3> An optional <<transform,transform>> to transform the payload and prepare the data that should be indexed
<4> The elasticsearch index to store the data to
<5> An optional `_id` for the document, if it should always be the same document.


[[index-action-attributes]]
==== Index action attributes

[options="header"]
|======
|Name                     |Required    | Default    | Description

| `index`                 | yes        | -          | The Elasticsearch index to index into.


| `doc_id`                | no         | -          | The optional `_id` of the document.

| `execution_time_field`  | no         | -          | The field that will store/index the watch execution
                                                      time.

| `timeout`               | no         | 60s        | The timeout for waiting for the index api call to
                                                      return. If no response is returned within this time,
                                                      the index action times out and fails. This setting
                                                      overrides  the default  timeouts.

| `refresh`               | no         | -          | Optional setting of the {ref}/docs-refresh.html[refresh policy]
                                                      for the write request

|======

[[anatomy-actions-index-multi-doc-support]]
==== Multi-document support

Like with all other actions, you can use a <<transform, transform>> to replace
the current execution context payload with another and by that change the document
that will end up indexed.

The index action plays well with transforms with its support for the special `_doc`
payload field.

When resolving the document to be indexed, the index action first looks up for a
`_doc` field in the payload. When not found, the payload is indexed as a single
document.

When a `_doc` field exists, if the field holds an object, it is extracted and indexed
as a single document. If the field holds an array of objects, each object is treated as
a document and the index action indexes all of them in a bulk.

An `_index`, or `_id` value can be added per document to dynamically set the ID
of the indexed document.