I recently went down the path of learning about Azure Search. One of the requirements of this project is to be able to search on categories the item might have. I had originally tackled this problem years ago with Lucene and SOLR inside XBlog. When dealing with a multilist field of guids you search predicate simply needs to be: (item => item[“some field”].Contains(myCategoryItem.ID.tostring()) .
But to my surprise, this doesn’t work with azure search. To add further to the gloom and doom, I found in official Sitecore documentation that this is not suppose to work at all: https://doc.sitecore.net/sitecore_experience_platform/setting_up_and_maintaining/search_and_indexing/support_reference_for_azure_search?roles=developer .
Specifically this information here:
“Important
You must not apply queries such as StartsWith, Contains to fields with of type EDM.String that contain paths (such as /sitecore/content/home) or collections of GUIDs. This is because Azure Search matches regular expression searches to single words.”
Well being the stubborn old programmer that I am, this did not sit well. I don’t like being told I can’t do something, so I dug deeper to find a solution around this. First I dug into the Azure search api on the portal site to see exactly how values of my multilist field were being stored, and this what I found:
“category_sm”: [
“efc89afd55e04000bbbad30960d4ecb3”,
“ace388700f904d529268219dfa35b55d”
],
Turns out when Azure stores a mutilist field of guids, they are stored as separate values and all the special characters are removed from the guid.
So the next step was to find a way to actually search on this. So I started down the path of some rather rough code. Just removing all the extra stuff that could cause problems. To my surprise, the answer was very simple:
string id = categoryIncludeItem.ID.ToString();
id = id.Replace(“{“, “”);
id = id.Replace(“}”, “”);
id = id.Replace(“-“, “”);
categoryIncludePredicate = categoryIncludePredicate.And(item => item[“category_sm”].Contains(id.ToLower()));
There seems to be a few unsolved questions in the community around this, so I hope this helps someone out there also struggling with this concept. I have yet to vet this more, with more complex search queries, but it appears that basic queries at least work.
Up North Sitecore 