Monitoring search indexing tasks

Indexing tasks keep smart search indexes up-to-date according to changes made to content (for both Azure Search indexes and locally stored indexes). The system automatically creates indexing tasks when:

• A page or object covered by a search index is created, removed or has one of its fields modified
• An administrator Rebuilds or Optimizes a search index

To view a list of search indexing tasks that are waiting to be processed, open the Smart search application and select the Azure tasks or Local tasks tab.

By default, the system processes indexing tasks immediately when they are created. The list of indexing tasks is usually empty unless there is a long-running rebuild task, or the application is generating a very large number of indexing tasks.

If you encounter problems with new content not being indexed correctly, you can use the list of indexing tasks to investigate the issue. The list provides the following information about indexing tasks (depending on the task type):

• Task type – the action that the task performs with the data of the search index (Update, Delete, Rebuild, Optimize, Process)
• Object type – the type of object for which the task was created
• Search field – the index field used to find the correct data item inside the search index (_id in most cases)
• Task value / Additional data – additional data used by the indexing task, typically an identifier of the related object (ID or code name)
• Related object – the name of the specific object related to the indexing task
• Task created – the date and time when the system created the indexing task
• Result – if an error occurs while processing the indexing task, you can view the error message details here

To clear the indexing queue or stop unnecessary indexing, Delete () individual tasks.

Disabling automatic processing for local indexing tasks

For locally stored search indexes, you can disable automatic running of indexing tasks by adding the CMSProcessSearchTasksByScheduler key to the /configuration/appSettings section of your application’s web.config file:

<add key="CMSProcessSearchTasksByScheduler" value="true" />

With the key set to true, the system creates local search indexing tasks, but does not run them. In this case, you need to regularly process the tasks using the Execute local search tasks scheduled task. You cannot manually Process tasks when the key is enabled.