ECM - searching within subfolders won't show any results

ECM
1

My customer pointed out an issue the other day I was hoping someone here has an idea about.

If they navigate through their folder tree on the left panel, stop at a specific department folder (which has subfolders for each vendor), and make a keyword search, nothing will appear in the search results.

  • “Include Subfolders” is checked
  • The folder structure is something like this: AP>Invoices>Store>Department>Vendor>invoice.pdf
    They navigate to the department they need to search inside.
  • They are definitely using the “search criteria” section, not the global search
  • OCR is good on the documents - I can find the invoice and Ctrl-F the keyword. It will show up in a global search
  • It works as expected in my other customer’s DocStar, so I know I’m not imagining an issue

We’re having issues with the support portal so here I am. It is an on-prem installation and maybe a minor version or two behind.

2

This sounds like it is likely to be a permissions problem. I would suggest making them a Site Admin for a test to see if they can then find the document.

Also, I’ve seen some funky behaviour with User Preferences, so try resetting that back to default.

3

I should have mentioned this in the OP, but it isn’t permissions. I can replicate this on my admin account. The user can also navigate directly to the document he was intending to search for

4

I would start the Re-Index process. On occasion we cannot find things that are clearly locate-able the old fashioned way.

The other issue may be that the document itself is missing a Sec Class (it didn’t inherit from the folder when placed there)

5

Does that require scheduled downtime? This customer uses ECM pretty much constantly

Would I need to Delete & Re-index, or is the regular reindex enough?

6

It doesn’t require downtime, but searching stops working 100%. Processing can still occur unless the workflow requires ‘finding’ another document.

I always do a full delete/reindex when I do it. I’ve got like 300k documents and it takes about an hour I think. And Sunday mornings are always the best time :slight_smile: for us anyway,.

7

I agree with Mike that a delete & reindex is a good starting point. If you don’t have much downtime, then whenever the fewest number of people are in the system is a good time to do it. Support has always told me to to a full delete & reindex. I’ve tried just reindexing and it didn’t seem like it has ever helped as much.

Since you said it works in another environment, it might be worth getting screenshots of each search criteria screen to compare. I’ve seen users accidentally have the Content Type dropdown with a value selected which was filtering out their results.

8

Excited It Was Me GIF by CBS

9

Unfortunately, the re-index did nothing. Scheduled it overnight and I still can’t search

10

if you go to the Admin tab, Performance Stats, it will list all the tables and there is a column for Index Size, in particular check the Documents table Index Size. Also, you may want to go back through the Installation routine and check the index settings - if they are incorrect the system won’t be able to utilize the index even if it’s generating. Since it’s on-prem you should be able to go back through that and adjust, if necessary, otherwise it’s also self-healing so it might just fix the whole problem anyway.

other than those, i’m running out of ideas :wink:

11

I’ll give those things a try, thanks.

I have the customer doing a workaround by using the filters (it works that way), but of course they don’t wanna do it that way :roll_eyes: