After reindex, some base Coveo-defined fields missing from content

Question

I've added some computed fields so I did the necessary re-indexing. Along the way, though, I noticed that a couple of the "default" Coveo fields (that is, field definitions in Coveo.SearchProvider.config that ship with Coveo for Sitecore) are no longer filling with data for my content, specifically "alltemplates" and "site". This is with CES 7 on-premesis, June release.

For the moment, I'm using Coveo_master_index. If I go to Index in the admin portal, choose my index, click Fields on the left, click Manage Field Sets, then choose Field Sets for Coveo_master_index, I can still see the fields listed. But if I then go to the Content section, click Index Browser, and search for a piece of content by name, when I look at the field list neither "alltemplates" nor "site" are present anymore. I first noticed it because my queries use "alltemplates" to ensure the result set is using a specific base template, and during the process none of them returned data; as soon as I removed the "alltemplates" part of the query, the data showed up.

I haven't modified the Coveo.SearchProvider.config file, and my new computed fields are in a separate patch config that fires after all the other Coveo ones. To add to the oddness of this, if I comment out my computed field definitions from my patch config and re-index, "alltemplates" and "site" come back into play. Is there some maximum number of fields that can be in play at once or something?

Answer 1

This looks like an issue caused by to the way Sitecore config files are merged with a ref attribute.

Since the <configuration> node has a ref to coveo/defaultIndexConfiguration, you will lose the fieldMap node coming from defaultIndexConfiguration if you redefine it in a specific index.

You should either try patching the defaultIndexConfiguration fieldMap instead, or copy your whole fieldMap into each index in your patch file.