Hello,

I've got an issue in which List items that are being crawled (in which just about all of the custom fields in the list have been configured as MetaData properties) cannot be searched against using the FullText SQL Query syntax if the field is empty. The crawler seems to be just omitting that property from the indexing of the Item.

For instance I will have a query that looks like this:

SELECT PropertyA, PropertyB FROM SCOPE() WHERE "scope"='MyCustomScope'

The custom scope limits the search results to only those in the lists I am crawling, but it will only return list items that have values in both PropertyA and PropertyB. If there is a list item that does not havea value for either of these fields, it is not returned at all. If I remove PropertyA or PropertyB from the above query, the missing items will show up.

Also, if I try to filter based on a NULL value, I get nothing. So assuming all list items have a value for PropertyA:

SELECT PropertyA FROM SCOPE() WHERE "scope"='MyCustomScope' AND PropertyB IS NULL

Returns nothing.

Is there a hotfix I am missing possibly?

Thanks in advance,

Mick

This a known limitation to MOSS search. Nulls are not stored in the mssdocprops table so search cannot evaluate them. Please look at this post:

http://www.sharepointblogs.com/smc750/archive/2007/06/20/custom-cross-list-search-development-pitfalls-part-two.aspx

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