drop_null_columns requires json or yaml format

[asmith-elastic]

This request will add an additional description to the drop_null_columns query parameter which notes that the parameter requires the format to be set to yaml or json. If any other format is being used, null columns will still be shown.

[github-actions]

Documentation preview:

• ✨ Changed pages

[elasticsearchmachine]

@asmith-elastic please enable the option "Allow edits and access to secrets by maintainers" on your PR. For more information, see the documentation.

[elasticsearchmachine]

Pinging @elastic/es-docs (Team:Docs)

[elasticsearchmachine]

Pinging @elastic/es-analytical-engine (Team:Analytics)

[nik9000]

Sounds a bit like a bug to be honest. OTOH, for things like Arrow we can't know if the column is all the way null without getting all the output which is kind of a thing we'd like to avoid.

[nik9000]

What about cbor and smile?

[asmith-elastic]

@nik9000 - Good catch! It does look like cbor and smile contains all_columns within the output, while (as you suspected) arrow does not. With this in mind, I'm going to make an update to this doc which notes the formats that are supported for both human readable and binary.

Given that this sounds like a bug, would you recommend I open up an associated issue to track if the other human readable options, such as csv, tsv, & txt has the same sort of limitations as arrow or if we are running into a bug?

[leemthompo]

@nik9000 are you happy to merge this docs PR?

[leemthompo]

Important

Elastic documentation is migrating to Markdown for version 9.0+. See the migration guide for details.

ℹ️ What's happening?

• Starting January 29, we will start closing all unmerged documentation PRs targeting main/master
• We're migrating from AsciiDoc to Markdown for 9.0+
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What do I need to do?

For <=8.x docs:

1. Rebase your PR to target the relevant 8.x branch instead
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For 9.0+ docs:

Option 1:

• Draft docs in Markdown
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Option 2:

• Open an issue in elastic/docs-content

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2. For external contributors: Open an issue in elastic/docs-content

[nik9000]

Ah! We've fixed drop_null_columns to work in text response formats.