Why have commerce items been indexed in my sitecore_master_index

Question

I was running a query against my Solr index (sitecore_master_index) and see that some commerce items have made it into the index. This is odd because I thought the commerce_master and commerce_web were the only indexes which should contain commerce items.

I checked ShowConfig.aspx and found the following section:

<processor type="Sitecore.Commerce.Engine.Connect.Pipelines.GetChildrenToIndex, Sitecore.Commerce.Engine.Connect" patch:source="Sitecore.Commerce.Engine.Connectors.Index.Common.config">
  <!--  The list of indexes that we do not want commerce items to be indexed to  -->
  <Indexes hint="list:AddString" help="Add index names below to stop crawling of Commerce items by the default crawler">
    <IndexName>sitecore_master_index</IndexName>
    <IndexName>sitecore_web_index</IndexName>
    <IndexName>sitecore_web1_index</IndexName>
    <IndexName>sitecore_web2_index</IndexName>
    <IndexName>sitecore_sxa_master_index</IndexName>
    <IndexName>sitecore_sxa_web_index</IndexName>
  </Indexes>
</processor>

Is this all that is necessary, or should I also exclude the commerce Category/Product/Product Variant templates as well?

Answer 1

The configuration is correct and it is not necessary to add the commerce items as excluded templates for the sitecore_master_index and sitecore_web_index.

If you use the "Re-Index Tree" button under the Developer tab in the content editor, it does not respect the Commerce GetChildrenToIndex pipeline settings shown in the question and can index commerce items into the master/web indexes.

Rebuilding the indexes from the Control Panel > Indexing Manager avoids this problem.