_content field not populating correctly

Question

We're on Sitecore 8.1 update 2 and I'm having issues with the content search API. Its my understanding the _content field in the index should contain an amalgamation of all the fields in the template. Looking at this SO question: What class indexes the _content index field, there is a list considered by Sitecore as text fields.

However, in my instance, this isn't happening. I have indexAllFields true in my config. Confused, I yielded and made my own basic _content crawler as a computed field based very loosely on https://kamsar.net/index.php/2014/05/indexing-subcontent/.

It didn't work. I debugged and the first field - it's type came through as "Rich NewText" - it didn't match the list in the linked SO answer, so it didn't get indexed in my computed field.

I've searched high and low (including core field definitions) for "Rich NewText" type .. it's clear to me this is the reason it isn't updating my _content field.

Also..

"Single-Line Text" is coming through as "Single-Line NewText"

"Multi-Line Text" is coming through as "Multi-Line NewText"

Using lucene and done loads of Sitecore search stuff before and never came across this before.

Can't post configs/code as they're in my air-gapped dev environment and can't just copy/paste out :-/

Any ideas? Smells like a bug in this version of Sitecore?

UPDATE: So, after a dig, the sitecore.config file has this:

<replacers>
    <replacer mode="off" id="publish" type="Sitecore.Text.Replacer, Sitecore.Kernel" singleInstance="true">
      <param desc="name">$(id)</param>
      <replacements hint="raw:AddReplacement">
        <regex find="Test[12]" replaceWith="Test" simpleTest="Test" ignoreCase="true" forPublish="true" />
        <simple find="Text" replaceWith="NewText" ignoreCase="false" forPublish="true" />
      </replacements>
    </replacer>
  </replacers>

.. this is an out the box value (also present in Vanilla Sitecore 8.2 rev. 180406). Wonder why SC does this and why it affects the field type? Anyone know if I can just remove this from the config?

Answer 1

Sitecore replacers are used when publishing content. You can read more about them in the article:

https://community.sitecore.net/technical_blogs/b/sitecorejohn_blog/posts/replacing-data-during-publication-with-the-sitecore-asp-net-cms

The configuration you pasted from the vanilla Sitecore config contains only 1 replacer and it's disabled (mode="off").

Someone must have enabled it at some point and publish your fields definition. That's why all your "Text" values were replaced with "NewText".

Disable the replacer and republish your site with republish option selected to make sure all your items in web database are processed.