Resolving "NoteField Values Not Getting Crawled In SharePoint 2013" Issue

Yesterday, we were working on one new feature in our project, where, there were new Content Types and Site Columns. Amongst those site columns, one field was of type “Note” (Type="Note").

Customer requirement was that we should show this “Note” field in Search Results web part in the second row, for each item. So, we performed regular procedure for showing this field in Search Results web part. We created a few pages filled with data for all fields (including this Note field) and then, ran full crawl. Within some time, Managed Properties were created under Search Schema. But they were not set as “Queryable”, “Searchable”, “Retrieveable”,“Refinable”. So, we applied those settings and ran the full crawl again.

After some time, when the crawl was done, we checked values from SharePoint Search Query Tool on Server. It showed values for all fields except this “Note” field. We checked all our configurations again but they were correct. We searched a lot for this issue on Google but couldn’t find satisfactory answer for this issue.

Then, while performing research, we added few other “Note” columns for testing with different settings. After crawling, we observed that in Elements.xml, this setting “UnlimitedLengthInDocumentLibrary” was “False” for this particular Note field where values were showing in search tool. And, it was “True” for other Note fields where values were missing.

This setting, if “True”, actually helps us to increase the text length to unlimited characters. And it seems, this is the reason why search crawler doesn’t consider crawling it to avoid bad performance and space constraints. We informed it to our customer and changed the requirement to keep only 255 characters length in “Note” field column.

Ideally, Note field allows only 255 characters and if you want to really allow more text in Note field, then you need to enable this property.

UnlimitedLengthInDocumentLibrary="TRUE"

You can see this setting from Site Settings > Site Columns >> Edit any note field.



Usually, in web parts like Search results, CBS etc., we show columns like Title, Image, URL, description etc. and we shouldn’t show big text columns in results. Such columns should be available only on individual pages (for ex. Content area, Note field etc).

I hope it will help someone out there!

Happy Learning!