Sitecore Solr/SearchStax Auto Suggestions - suggester was not built error and fix

HI Team,

This one will be very quick blog post, But sharing it here so it helps anyone on the internet having same issue

Problem

We are using SearchStax and we have been using auto suggestions functionality of it, Everything was working fine and suddenly lot of users started reporting that they are not able to search anything in the search box.

As this was P1, I started looking into the probable cause and logs, first i saw in console that we were getting 500 error, that means there is some issue being thrown from the backend.

Upon checking logs found following in logs

The error was "suggester was not built"

Well, I knew there is some issue with suggester which causing it to fail, but puzzle was, It has always been working for us

Now, because we have this error on SearchStax documentation, If you refer below link, it says

https://www.searchstax.com/docs/hc/suggester-was-not-built/

"The root cause is often query fields that are not defined in the Solr schema. Look in the solr.log files for index errors; fix the queries; update the schema; reload the indexes; and restart the suggester. The solution is likely to be along that path."

Well, I could confirm that there was no change with schema and on DEV / UAT it was working just fine

Solution

Before creating a support ticket with SearchStax, i wanted to spend sometime understanding it and looking into the logs in details, i got below URL which was getting fired while someone uses auto suggestion search box, and this URL was giving the error

https://<<solr cloud url>>/solr/sitecore_web_index/suggest?q=test+u&rows=100000000&fq=_indexname%3a(sitecore_web_index)&suggest=true&suggest.count=10&suggest.build=false&version=2.2&wt=xml

I read more about suggest.build and how suggester component is working, so if you refer below link

https://doc.sitecore.com/xp/en/developers/103/platform-administration-and-architecture/using-solr-auto-suggest.html

Well, i just tried changing that flag to true in above URL and hit it in the browser, Before this, i never did anything like this, it's new for me too, but well it started working and it was able to built the suggester and live site started showing the results just fine

Though i was able to resolve it, Just to double check this approach and as it was P1 and also to know why it stopped working? I created a ticket with SearchStax for this behavior, Awaiting for their reply & will update this space once i get something around it.

Comments

Why SitecoreAI - Getting into the shoes of the customer how to select right CMS

Hi Team, Lately, I have been talking to lot of our customers / potential customers and having pre-sales demos where one question always comes is "Why Sitecore" ? Now this question can be for any product which is out for sell. And as a technician I always get into product technical features, but at the same time as a pre-sales guy, it also makes me think, surely all competitive products have same features, so definitely answer to this is not in the technicalities. If you step back and think, we are also a customer in our daily life and buy lot of things, what is that process we go through? When we buy, how can your customer decide if this is a right fit for you or not, why we select A over B? Is it price? is it service? Is it a brand? Is it about features? Is it about brand loyalty? When it is a technical product, I am sure it cannot start with the technicalities of the product or selecting product itself, 100% not, I feel decision is always business strategy first and ...

Hell of sitecore aliases pipeline breaking the site with 500 error

Hello Friends, I belive this blog post is very important for everyone because, It has some very serious effect on working of your headless website, i will share my experience what we faced and how we resolved it Issue we started facing Our site started giving "Key cannot be null or empty" with YSOD like following Side affect Because of this 500 error, Our site pages were showing 500 custom error page intermittently and our MAU (Monthly Active User) drop rate increased. Sitecore KB There is already Sitecore KB article talking about this error but the patch which is provided on this link is confusing as well as very huge and it could bring other issues along with it as that upgrade patch also has lot of other things too which i did not want to introduce in our stable CMS. Known Issues - Retrieving the child items of resource items is not thread-safe Observation Though the surfaced exception was looking similar and giving same error and behavior given on this article, We looked...

Zero to Hero - A real life RCA of exact issue in Sitecore Managed Cloud environment

Hello All, The purpose of today's post is to share a real life burning and escalated scenario which was new to me and how did I approach it and how big the escalations were and what was the outcome Sitecore's goodwill was at stack not because Sitecore is not capable of handling it but just because our environment was Sitecore Managed Cloud, and any issue that comes if its infra, back end code, front end code will be first pointed as Sitecore issue and that is where our consultancy and experience will play a role to prove that it is not Sitecore issue. Issue we faced Out of the blue our site started giving "504 Gateway Time-out", and it was reported that almost everyone is getting this error, but when we used to browse the site, everything looked good and never 504. 504 Gateway Time-out error tells that, That the request went to Content Delivery servers of Sitecore from gateway, but gateway did not get response in time from those CDs and hence it gave time out error. ...

Daivagna Nanavati

Search This Blog