Remove custom templates from sitecore master index

Question

We are using Sitecore 8.2 update 3 and azure search for indexing.Azure search has limitation of 1000 fields so what we are planning to do is to remove the custom templates from the sitecore_master_index and add those fields to a new custom index.But my concern is will the sitecore content editor still be able to search these custom fields ?

Also is it a recommended practice to remove the custom fields from sitecore_master_index to reduce the size of master index ?

Answer 1

I recently upgraded from Lucence search to Azure search for one of our client and yes 1000 field limit very annoying thing with Azure search because the default Sitecore installation has that much of fields.

So you can choose two way to handle this -

1.You can set the following setting to false <indexAllFields>true</indexAllFields> in Sitecore.ContentSearch.Azure.DefaultIndexConfiguration.config and manually add the fields those are required in your search in Sitecore.ContentSearch.Azure.Index.Web.ExcludeFields.config

<include hint="list:AddIncludedField">
            <Column3Label>{D3062424-DB75-4AB3-B297-FE40B04C8114}</Column3Label> 
            ...........
            .........
 </include>

2. Or you can add the template id's that is required in your search instead of a particular field.

   <include hint="list:AddIncludedTemplate">
   <template>{44831A38-85F0-4370-8AA7-C3B7DC87965A}</template>
   </include>
   

3. Or you can both step1 and step2 together.

Or yon can go with another way by updating the Root of index in Sitecore.ContentSearch.Azure.Index.Web.config

<locations hint="list:AddCrawler">
              <crawler type="Sitecore.ContentSearch.SitecoreItemCrawler, Sitecore.ContentSearch">
                <Database>web</Database>
                <Root>/sitecore/Content/SiteNode/Home</Root>
              </crawler>
            </locations> 

And if you use the above configuration then content editor search will also work.