Alfresco Search Enterprise supported search query syntax.

Applications and Frameworks

• ADF Search Components
• ACA - Alfresco Content Application
• Alfresco Digital Workspace
• ReST API (only when using FTS search syntax)

Note: Alfresco Share web application is not supported

Search Features

• ACL Permission checks
• Sorting by relevancy
• Searching by content type and controlling paging and sorting
• Faceted search
• Filter by content size and mimetype
• Inclusion of additional properties in search results

Search for a single term

Single terms are tokenized before the search according to the appropriate data dictionary definition(s).

If you do not specify a field, it will search in the content and in the following properties: name, title and description. This is a shortcut for searching all properties of type content. Terms can not contain a whitespace.

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banana
TEXT:banana

Both of these queries will find any nodes with the word “banana” in any property of type d:content, however the first one will also get results from properties cm:name, cm:title or cm:description.

If the appropriate data dictionary definition(s) for the field supports both FTS and un-tokenized search, then FTS search will be used. FTS will include synonyms if the analyzer generates them.

Search in fields

Search specific fields rather than the default. Terms, and phrases can all be preceded by a field. If not the default field TEXT is used.

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field:term
field:"phrase"
field:'phrase'
=field:exact
~field:expand

Note: Exact Term searching, using the equals operator (=field:exact in the samples above) is only allowed if the default Alfresco Repository configuration has been changed to enable this feature.

Fields fall into three types, property fields, special fields, and fields for data types. Property fields evaluate the search term against a particular property, special fields are described in the following table, and data type fields evaluate the search term against all properties of the given type.

Search in multi-value fields

When you search in multi-value fields there are additional options available than for Search in fields. To search in multi-value fields your properties must have Multiple values enabled, for more see Create a property .

The following example queries are executed using a sample multi-valued property "mul:os" that stores values "MacOS" and "Linux".

mul:os:"MacOS"

Returns the document because "MacOS" is one of the values of the property.

mul:os:("MacOS" AND "Windows")

Does not return a document because the property doesn’t contain the value "Windows".

mul:os:("MacOS" OR "Windows")

Returns the document because "MacOS" is one of the values of the property, even though "Windows" is not.

Search for a phrase

Phrases are enclosed in double quotes. Any embedded quotes can be escaped using ‘’. If no field is specified then the default TEXT field will be used, as with searches for a single term.

The whole phrase will be tokenized before the search according to the appropriate data dictionary definition(s).

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"big yellow banana"

The behavior for phrase queries with Alfresco Search Enterprise (Elasticsearch) differs from Alfresco Search Services (Solr).

With Solr, searching for multiple terms in a phrase query returns results where all terms exist in any order. For example, searching “scary fish” returns results for “scary gigantic fish” and also “it’s OK if you have a fish, but scary if you don’t”.

With Elasticsearch searching for multiple terms in a phrase query returns results where all terms exist in the order supplied. For example, searching “scary fish” returns results for “there are scary fish in the water” but not “scary gigantic fish” or “it’s OK if you have a fish, but scary if you don’t”. An alternative is to search “scary AND fish” to find results where both terms occur in any order. See Search for conjunctions for more information.

Search for wildcards

Wildcards are supported in terms, phrases, and exact phrases using * to match zero, one, or more characters and ? to match a single character.

The * wildcard character can appear on its own and implies Google-style. The “anywhere after” wildcard pattern can be combined with the = prefix for identifier based pattern matching. Search will return and highlight any word that begins with the root of the word truncated by the * wildcard character.

All of the following will find the term apple.

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TEXT:app?e
TEXT:app*
TEXT:*pple
appl?
*ple
=*ple
"ap*le"
"***le"
"?????"

Note: Exact Term searching, using the equals operator (=*ple in the samples above), is only allowed if the default Alfresco Repository configuration has been changed in order to enable this feature.

When performing a search that includes a wildcard character, it is best to wrap your search term in double quotation marks. This ensures all metadata and content are searched.

Search for conjunctions

Single terms, and phrases can be combined using AND in upper, lower, or mixed case.

The AND operator is interpreted as “every term is required”.

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big AND yellow

These queries search for nodes that contain all the terms big and yellow in any content or in properties cm:name, cm:title or cm:description.

Search for disjunctions

Single terms, and phrases can be combined using OR in upper, lower, or mixed case.

The OR operator is interpreted as “at least one is required, more than one or all can be returned”.

By default search fragments will be ORed together.

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big yellow banana
big OR yellow OR banana
TEXT:big TEXT:yellow TEXT:banana
TEXT:big OR TEXT:yellow OR TEXT:banana

These queries search for nodes that contain at least one of the terms big, yellow, or banana in any content. The first two will also get results from properties cm:name, cm:title or cm:description.

Search for negation

You can narrow your search results by excluding words with the NOT syntax. Single terms, and phrases can be combined using “NOT” in upper, lower, or mixed case, or prefixed with “!” or “-”. These queries search for nodes that contain the terms yellow in any content.

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yellow NOT banana
yellow !banana
yellow -banana
NOT yellow banana
-yellow banana
!yellow banana

Note: In the three initial samples above, since OR is the default operator for searching, the results are expected to include every node with “yellow” and every node without the “banana” term. If you want to get nodes with the “yellow” term and without the term “banana”, use the following expression: yellow AND NOT banana.

The NOT operator can only be used for string keywords and doesn’t work for numerals or dates.

Prefixing any search qualifier with a - excludes all results that are matched by that qualifier.

Search for optional, mandatory, and excluded elements of a query

Sometimes AND and OR are not enough. If you want to find documents that must contain the term “car”, score those with the term “red” higher, but do not match those just containing “red”.

The following example finds documents that contain the term “car”, score those with the term “red” higher, but does not match those just containing “red”:

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+car |red

Note: At least one element of a query must match, or not match, for there to be any results.

All AND and OR constructs can be expressed with these operators.

Escaping characters

Any character can be escaped using the backslash “\” in terms, IDs (field identifiers), and phrases. Java unicode escape sequences are supported. Whitespace can be escaped in terms and IDs.

For example:

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cm:my\ content:my\ name

Search for ranges

Inclusive ranges can be specified in Google-style. There is an extended syntax for more complex ranges. Unbounded ranges can be defined using MIN and MAX for numeric and date types and “u0000” and “FFFF” for text (anything that is invalid).

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TEXT:apple..banana
my:int:[0 TO 10]
my:float:2.5..3.5
my:float:0..MAX
mt:text:[l TO "uFFFF"]

When searching for a date range you can use a partial date. Elasticsearch replaces the missing date components with the values below:

• Month of year: 01
• Day of month: 01
• Hour of day: 23
• Minute of hours: 59
• Second of minute: 59
• Nano of second: 999_999_999

The last four items will be replaced with 0 when the date component is missing in the minimum date in a range expression, e.g. [1950 to 2021] will be executed as [1950-01-01T00:00:00 TO 2021-01-01T23:59:59].

In the REST API you can specify the timezone to be used in search for date ranges.

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{
    "query": {
        "query": "cm:created:['2021-05-01T09:00:00' TO '2021-05-28T09:05:59']",
        "language": "afts"
    },
    "localization": {
        "timezone": "Asia/Yerevan"
    }
}

Query time boosts

Query time boosts allow matches on certain parts of the query to influence the score more than others.

All query elements can be boosted: terms, phrases, exact terms, expanded terms, proximity (only in filed groups), ranges, and groups.

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term^2.4
"phrase"^3
term~0.8^4
=term^3
~term^4
cm:name:(big * yellow)^4
1..2^2
[1 TO 2]^2
yellow AND (car OR bus)^3

Search using date math

Date range queries can be more powerful when applying date math functions. AFTS supports adding and subtracting periods, as well as rounding:

All of these examples have used an inclusive lower bound and an exclusive upper bound. Other bounds can be used but Search Enterprise performs rounding based on the type of bound being used:

For more details see the Elasticsearch documentation.

Search for an exact term

Note: Exact Term searching is only allowed if the default Alfresco Repository configuration has been changed in order to enable this feature, for more see Pre-indexing considerations.

To search for an exact term you must prefix it with “=”. The supported syntax:

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=term
=term1 =term2
="multi term phrase"
=field:term
=field:term1 =field:term2
=field:“multi term phrase”

If you don’t specify a field the search runs against name, description, title, and content. If the field specified is TOKENIZED=false, only the full field is matched. If the field you specified is TOKENIZED=TRUE or TOKENIZED=BOTH then the search is run on the cross locale tokenized version of the field.

Note: Exact Term Search is disabled by default, for more see Pre-indexing considerations.

Searches that involve stopwords

Stopwords are removed from the query.

For example:

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stopword1 quick fox stopword2 brown

becomes

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quick fox brown

This behavior is different from Search and Insight Engine and Search Services in that it keeps stopwords in the query to build positional queries, for example:

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stopword1 quick fox stopword2 brown

becomes

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stopword1_quick quick fox_stopword2 fox stopword2_brown brown

Search for proximity

Google-style proximity is supported.

To specify proximity for fields, use grouping.

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big * apple
TEXT:(big * apple)
big *(3) apple
TEXT:(big *(3) apple)

Search query templates

The FTS query language supports query templates. These are intended to help when building application specific searches.

A template is a query but with additional support to specify template substitution.

• %field

  Insert the parse tree for the current ftstest and replace all references to fields in the current parse tree with the supplied field.

• %(field1, field2)%(field1 field2)

  (The comma is optional.) Create a disjunction, and for each field, add the parse tree for the current ftstest to the disjunction, and then replace all references to fields in the current parse tree with the current field from the list.

Templates can refer to other templates.

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nameAndTitle -> %(cm:name, cm:title)
nameAndTitleAndDesciption -> %(nameAndTitle, cm:description)

Requesting optional item information

We have taken what we’re calling a “performance first” approach with the API. This means that each endpoint, by default, only returns the item information that is efficient to retrieve.

If additional processing is required on the server side to obtain the item information, then it’s made available via the include query parameter.

The http://localhost:8080/alfresco/api/-default-/public/alfresco/versions/1/nodes/-my-/children?include=properties,aspectNames request shows how you can also include the properties and aspects for each node in your home folder when listing its children.

As with the orderBy and where parameters, the include parameter is specific to the endpoint so you’ll need to consult the API Explorer to see what extra item information is available.