Catastrophic failure when crawling BCS data in SharePoint 2013

Question

I am getting error in search crawl Logs when doing a full crawl on a Business Data Connectivity content source. The content source is set up to crawl a SQL BCS entity that has a stream accessor, finder, id enumerator, and specific finder method defined. The stream accessor retrieves the Image (PNG) file stored in the remote database. I can crawl this data source if I remove the stream accessor from the BCS modal; however, the customer wants these images to show in search results just like an image stored in share point (thumbnail preview).

The error I get is: "Catastrophic failure (Exception from HRESULT: 0x8000FFFF (E_UNEXPECTED))"

I should also say that I have invoked all the methods via C# Console Application and am able to invoke all the methods with out an error. Also I can create an external list and use the "download" link provided there to invoke the stream accessor with out a problem. I also have also verified that the SQL is correct and SQL server does not return and error by directly running the SQL I have in the modal via SQL Management Studio.

Also this is all in SharePoint 2013

Do any of you have any idea why this error is occurring, or another way to get SP 2013 to show the thumbnail preview for these external items?

Answer 1

Are you creating a URL in the search result for the Images in search results? I have seen the stream accessor used in cases where the BLOB is to be indexed. The preview is handled by the Display Template. (Directly for images in an img tag and through the WOPI server for registered documents. If all you need is previews, why create the accessor?

As for debugging the crawl, you can debug a crawl session by using Visual Studio debugging attached to the crawl process.