I found out that when you upload - let's say a file named "luke.doc" (just to give an example) via CIFS then you need to use luke* when you search.
When you use the web client to upload you can use just luke.
However, behavior changes - sometimes when searching something else and then retrying, it does not work any more and you must use luke*.
Unfortunately this is not reproducable - it is just sometimes. I tried playing around with the browser locales (Firefox) and first it seemed to make a difference, currently I am quite sure it has nothing to do with it.
It seems now that after a server restart for the same document I need to use the asterix.
But I have a few documents in the repository that still - after server restart - do not need the Asterix in general. But examining I found out that in the file information of some of those test documents the word "Test" was also found in the title property of the file itself which has been automatically extracted when importing it using the web client.
OK, made further tests with another document. First had only the name of the document - in my Sample "Sepp sei kein Depp.doc", results:
Searched for "Sepp": Document found.
Searched for "kein": Document not found (thought, maybe a stoppword), ok
Searched for "Depp": Document not found, ?!?!?
Searched for "sei": Document found, ?!?!?!?!?
OK, now edited title property to "Sepp sei kein Depp", results:
Searched for "kein": Document found, aha: Maybe only title is correctly indexed…
Edited title property to "Sepp sei Depp", results:
Searched for "kein": Document found ?!?!?!??
Restarting Alfresco Server.
Searched for "kein": Document found ?!??!!?
Searched for other documents with variants of the name: None of those found where I had not put the name also in the title. So name seems not to be searchable after server restart.
Searched again for "kein": Previously found document not found any more. - AHA! Fulltext indexing of new documents seems to work much faster than updating of existing documents, mmhh, but never mind.
Edited Title of Document adding the word "Habakuk":
Searched for "habakuk": No document found - ok I have to wait maybe a while…
Searched for "sepp": Found several documents having "Sepp" in their name (but not in their title or content), but "Sepp.doc" can only be found using "Sepp*" (although none of those documents uploaded using CIFS).
… waited about 5 Minutes … Document still not found.
OK, I am restarting Alfresco Server…
Did not help, I am still waiting a while - maybe it takes longer, so I am waiting…
Waited about half an hour - no change in behavior.
Tested on 2 other installations on 2 different machines: One Machine shows same or similar (did not test all in detail) behavior the other seems to work. All run exactly the same version of Alfresco: Labs - v3.0.0 (Stable 1526).
…Correction - even the machine that seems to work starts to show similar behavior after Alfresco server restart.
So my conclusion: I do not have any idea how the logic is on indexing - in other words: It's simply not reliable!
And searching is a very basic feature of a DMS/ECM. A customer will cut my head of if this is not working. We are shortly before our first real project.
What shall I do?