Filtering on AEM OOTB search results is not giving accurate results

[pharidoss]

Env: AEMaaCS

I created a new page under sites and was able to search the page using AEM OOTB search feature, but when i was trying to filter the results based on "Publish Status" as "Unpublished" it was not showing any results. Interestingly if the page is once published and then unpublished, the filter seems to be working fine. It is only for the new pages created it doesn't seem to work

Any ideas???

[SantoshSai · Accepted solution]

Hi @pharidoss ,

I have checked it following similar steps as you mentioned by applying Publish Status filter as both "Published" as well as "Unpublished" and found same result as you. However, I believe it is expected result, because

1. When you publish page the property called cq:lastReplicationAction is set to "Activate".
2. When you un-publish page same property will be updated as "Deactivate".

and according to OOTB functionality query fetches based on those properties and gives us result.

Additionally,  referring to the Adobe documentation here  

• Unexpected search results and issues

haven't mentioned expecting such issue.

Hope that helps!

Regards,

Santosh

[pharidoss]

Thanks for the detailed response @SantoshSai, I understand the technical PoV but functionally it would be difficult to explain this to authors (anyone) as they would naturally expect the new unpublished pages to show up by applying that filter. 

[SantoshSai]

@pharidoss Agree! Unfortunately, that's how the functionality per Adobe. We could customize it, but it would be costly operation and depends level of necessity is.

[DEBAL_DAS]

I agree with @SantoshSai here. 

With all due respect I would say content author has their own thought process, they normally use generic terms. So, we need to need explain in such way that they will understand that there is no difference between publish/unpublish, activate/deactivate and but all these are interchangeable only.

Please add these details in your authoring guide as mentioned https://aem4beginner.blogspot.com/whats-difference-between.

The newly created pages don't have cq:lastReplicationAction property, after first time publishing only cq:lastReplicationAction property do exist.