Filtering search results by PublicationDate doesn`t return any results

Sep 7, 2016
Knowledge

Title

URL Name

Filtering-search-results-by-PublicationDate-doesn-t-return-any-results

Article Number

000186932

Environment

Product: Sitefinity Version: 5.x, 6.x, 7.x, 8.x, 9.x OS: All supported OS versions Database: All supported database servers

Question/Problem Description

Filtering search results by PublicatonDate or other filter searchable field results in no search results get returned. There is actually data to be returned that matches the filters, but it never gets returned. The approach used includes customization based on this documentation article: http://docs.sitefinity.com/for-developers-customize-search-results-by-overriding-the-searchresults-class and the PublicationDate filter is modified to filter based on date range (from Date to Date).

myDatesFilter.AddClause(new SearchFilterClause("PublicationDate", new DateTime(2016, 08, 01), FilterOperator.Greater));
myDatesFilter.AddClause(new SearchFilterClause("PublicationDate", new DateTime(2016, 09, 30), FilterOperator.Less));

Steps to Reproduce

Clarifying Information

Error Message

Defect Number

Enhancement Number

Cause

Applying the search filter reaching the maximal allowed limit of boolen queries (1024 its hardcoded).
Such great number of boolean queries occur because filtering by date range filters using not good filtering approach.
- With the date range filter where Date FilterOperator.Greater takes all items in the search index that have PublicationDate grater than the selected date in the filter. If the items in the search index have PublicationDates that are all different and have variations that are more than 1024 in number the filtering will not occur.
- With date range filter where FilterOperator.Less the same occurs.

This is a problem in Lucene 2.9.2 that is built into Sitefinity and by default is used as search service.

Resolution

Change the search service from Lucene (default) to Elastic search. http://docs.sitefinity.com/generate-and-store-search-indexes-in-the-cloud#setup-sitefinity-cms-to-use-elasticsearch (note you have to use elastic search version lower than 2.0).

Elastic search uses the latest version of Lucene for .net and there is no such issue there. There are no code changes required when switching the search service. Just reindex all existing search indexes.

Workaround

Don`t use the filtering provided by SearchFilterClause and instead filter the results in memory after the complete set of unfiltered results was returned.

1. Execute unfiltered search query
var result = service.Search(searchQuery)
2. Create a method to perform filtering

private bool FieldNameValueCheck(IField field, string name, string value, string valueLess)
{
if (field.Name.Equals(name))
{
bool nameCheck = field.Name.Equals(name);
//the date value
var fieldValue = Int64.Parse(field.Value.ToString().Substring(0,8));
bool dateInRange = false;
if (fieldValue >= Int64.Parse(value) && fieldValue < Int32.Parse(valueLess))
{
dateInRange = true;
}

return nameCheck && dateInRange;
}
return false;
}

3.Filter the query using the new method:

var filteredResults = result.Where(iDoc => iDoc.Fields
.Any(field => this.FieldNameValueCheck(field, name: "PublicationDate", value: "20001001", valueLess: "20201030"))).ToList();

Notes

Keyword Phrase

Last Modified Date

9/7/2016 7:15 AM

Filtering search results by PublicationDate doesn`t return any results

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