RT 5.0.2 Full-Text Search - Odd Behavior

RT Users
1

I have RT 5.0.2 installed on a FreeBSD 13.2 box with PostgreSQL 13.12 database. I have followed the directions to enable full-text indexing on this web page:

https://docs.bestpractical.com/rt/5.0.2/full_text_indexing.html

I have configured RT_SiteConfig.pm, run the rt-setup-fulltext-index command, and have cron running the rt-fulltext-indexer ccommand every 15 minutes, which runs without errors. The attachmentsindex table has ~ 650 rows, which is probably about right for our installation (it’s somewhat new, and there are only a few hundred tickets so far).

However, when I put “an error occurred” in the search box, nothing is returned. If I search for just “error occurred”, I get results. Is this expected behavior?

2

So I figured out that the problem is that RT’s “simple search” isn’t really that simple. Users have to be trained to put quotes around their search words if they want to search the full ticket text, and by default inactive tickets are not included. This is not intuitive to users. You can make simple search include all tickets by using the following option in your RT_SiteConfig.pm file:

Set($OnlySearchActiveTicketsInSimpleSearch, 0);

But, users still need to be trained to put quotes around their search words if they want to search the ticket bodies.

This is not a “simple search”. The “simple search” should perform a full-text search of all ticket content for all tickets by default. The “simple search” should work like Google: you don’t have to put any special operators or detail into the search box to get useful results.