I figured this out. The problem is related to TaxonomyHiddenList.
Those terms initially were copied from an Excel spreadsheet and had invisible character at the end which was visible only in SP List interface, not in Term Store Editor. The character was removed next day and everyone forgot about the issue. However all of this had some unexpected consequences.
First of all, when you try to use a term in any field SP creates a record in TaxonomyHiddenList to cache the value. If there is something wrong with the term (like special unicode character in our case) SP creates a "broken" (or invalid) record which sometimes does not have any Title and always has UNVALIDATED
as the value in CatchAllData
field. Moreover, the record has empty CatchAllDataLabel
field and all Term<LANGUAGE_CODE_HERE>
have hash #
character in front of the values.
Unfortunately, it looks like if the record has a "broken" state when you fix the term in your Term Store the synchronization TimerJob never synchronize the term again for some reason (in our case 2 weeks time).
How does this affect search index? Okay, looks like search is using CatchAllData
value to build ows_taxid_...
property value as the field contains full path to the term as a |
separated Base64 encoded Term, all Term parents, TermSet and TermStore IDs. When CatchAllData
is set to UNVALIDATED
crawler cannot decode the path correctly and the property stays blank.
How to fix this? I have not found the simple way, at first I tried to remove a record from the hidden list, in result the value disappeared from all documents, so data was lost forever, fortunately I did this test on Dev environment. After all the only way I found is to write a PS script to rebuild/recover all the "broken" records.
Overall, it looks like the problem is quite rare, but if someone needs help I published the script here. Be careful with it as it can break you Site Collection, so test on Dev or QA environment before applying on any production Site Collection. DO NOT RUN IT IF YOU DO NOT COMPLETELY UNDERSTAND WHAT THE SCRIPT CAN CHANGE IN YOUR SYSTEM AND WHAT SIDE EFFECTS IT CAN CAUSE. Potentially you can adjust the scrip to use it as real time synchronization mechanism if you need rename a term quickly without waiting for OOTB TimerJob (I do not recommend this).
Unfortunately I was not able to find anything in MS Documentation describing that hash character may mean a broken synchronization, so this answer is base only on my experience. Please comment if you have any document which describes this behavior.