NoteField values not getting crawled in SharePoint 2013

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 webpart in second row for each item. So we performed regular procedure for showing this field in search results web part. We created 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 then 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 and 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 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 our customer and changed 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 in individual Pages (for ex. Content area, Note field etc).

I hope it will help someone out there!

Happy Learning! J