topic Re: How to Query Historical Document Versions by Custom Metadata ? in Alfresco Forum

How to Query Historical Document Versions by Custom Metadata ?

med — Mon, 14 Sep 2026 15:59:14 GMT

I’m using ACS 25.3 with Search Enterprise 5.3 and Elasticsearch.

I have a requirement to query previous document versions based on custom metadata using AFTS.

For example, I would like to search for documents based on a custom property and retrieve matching historical versions of those documents, rather than only the current version.

Is this possible using AFTS? If so, what would be the appropriate query syntax or approach to achieve this?

Re: How to Query Historical Document Versions by Custom Metadata ?

angelborroy — Tue, 15 Sep 2026 05:59:19 GMT

Version store is not indexes in Elasticsearch.

Try db-afts syntax, that uses directly the database.

https://docs.hyland.com/r/Alfresco/Alfresco-Search-Enterprise/5.3/Alfresco-Search-Enterprise/Configure/Transactional-metadata-query

Re: How to Query Historical Document Versions by Custom Metadata ?

med — Tue, 15 Sep 2026 08:08:29 GMT

Thanks for the suggestion. I understand that the Version Store is not indexed in Elasticsearch and that db-afts can be used to query the database directly.

However, I noticed something in the API Explorer documentation for the Search API regarding the Request Scope.It states that, in addition to the default nodes location , the search scope can be set to versions or deleted-nodes.

For example: "scope": { "locations": ["versions"] }

This seems to indicate that the search API can target the version Store explicitly ?? could custom metadata on historical versions be queried this way ?