Item field is "$name"

[klinden]

After publishing an item there is a short window of time (anywhere from 1-10 minutes) during which sometimes an item displayed on my site will have "$name" in a particular field (which is the StandardValues value for the field). I'm assuming this has something to do with the period of time in which the index is being rebuilt, but it still seems odd to me as my code is actually reading the real item, not the SkinnyItem.

http://pastebin.com/1GaKN9ek - Configuration http://pastebin.com/n9bnBw72 - Item retrieval

[enordberg]

Is it possible that your item is publishing, but the version is not yet published? In that case, the search might be finding the item without a version.

I have seen similar issues, but not related to search directly. Where I've seen it, it tends to be from one of the following:

• Workflow prevents an item version from being published, though the item is published.
• Multiple languages exist and some languages do not have item versions.

If this is the case, it might work to check for item==null or item.Versions.Count==0. That should detect an empty item version.

I hope this helps. thanks, Eric

[klinden]

Thanks, this is helpful. In the particular instance this morning, though, my content editor was approving version 2 of an item so worst case I would have thought version 1 would have been retrieved instead of version 2. I could put in a check for item.Fields["Title"].Value != "$name", but I'd really like to get to the core of the problem so I don't have to put this "hack" everywhere I use indexing. Sounds like it might be a Sitecore problem though not a problem with this module. I'll try submitting a support ticket and see if I can get them to help :)

[enordberg]

The best resources I have seen on this issue are from the language Fallback module. That module checks for items without language versions and substitutes the fallback version.

This might help if you do end up digging into the code behind this: http://marketplace.sitecore.net/en/Modules/Language_Fallback.aspx.

[klinden]

Thanks for the insight. We only have a very small handful of items in our solution that have more than one language and none of them are the items that are causing problems so I'm not sure this will help this particular issue.

[klinden]

Turns out this actually is a bug with the module. After a pretty extensive back and forth, one of the support techs at Sitecore was able to figure this out. Alex, I'm not sure if you can see support tickets or not, but the ticket in reference is 381588. Basically, there's a line of code in the SearchHelper class which needs modified that deals with how the item's URI is retrieved. See the full Sitecore response by Ivan Domashchenko below:

I investigated the code and found a potential cause.

According to the code, items are retrieved from the web database corresponding to item URI’s. These URI’s are stored in the indexes, each of these URI’s contains an ID of an item, a language and a specific version(!). During auto publishing, a previous version of an item was deleted and a new was published. Since the process of index updating was not finished (or even started), the indexes still contain URI’s that refer to previous versions and every time when you refresh a page, the code renders versions of items that don't exist.

As a result, you see the standard values of this item until the indexes are not updated.

Please modify the code of the GetItemsFromSearchResult method of the SearchHelper class and try to reproduce the issue:

public static void GetItemsFromSearchResult(IEnumerable searchResults, List items, bool showAllVersions) { foreach (SearchResult result in searchResults) { Field field = result.Document.GetField(BuiltinFields.Url); if ((field != null) && !string.IsNullOrEmpty(field.StringValue())) { ItemUri itemUri = new ItemUri(field.StringValue()); itemUri = new ItemUri(itemUri.ItemID, itemUri.Language, Sitecore.Data.Version.Latest, itemUri.DatabaseName); SkinnyItem item = new SkinnyItem(itemUri); ... } } }

[alexshyba]

Thanks guys! @klinden, I've fixed the issue in SkinnyItem.GetItem() method, see my comment here: sitecorian/SitecoreSearchContrib@596459836d719dbaec85f7d8aaf97e4ba6112020

[rhamille]

Hi Alex,

We are experiencing the exact same issue although we are already using the latest code.

Anything else that I should be checking?

Thanks!

[alexshyba]

Indeed, it looks like there is another bug in SearchHelper. Looking into it.

[alexshyba]

Should be fixed now. Please report if the problem does not go away.

[rhamille]

Thanks Alex! Looks ok on my local and waiting for the code promotion to our UAT server.