Search on Workflow Quick Edit State

One of our users created a custom search so that he could search for the workflow state of items within his site. That search works perfectly for all workflow states with the exception of Quick Edit. Any ideas why that search would fail while others succeed?

I have a feeling the cause is that the search index for the content item is not updated when that item is transitioned into Quick Edit. And while Quick Edit has a certain implied temporal nature, I think we all know that users can just forget to move the item back to public. So is this a bug, or is it a feature?

The workaround we found was to use the All Community View > All Community Content, and add the workflow state to the display format, then the user can just sort on the workflow state column.

That’s proper behavior. After an item goes public, any changes made while it is checked out are not indexed until it is checked back in (because only the current revision is indexed.)
The Quick Edit state itself has nothing to do with it. Once it is checked back in, it will be indexed and will appear in search results. It so happens that many people just transition back to public w/o checking in first, so it may appear that items in the QE state are not indexed, but this could happen in any state.

The idea behind this is that when users are searching for content to link to in their pages, they should find the current content, not something that another user is in the middle of editing.

I found this same behavior in our implementation (Rhythmyx 6.5.2), and it happened even when the item was checked in, so it was not related to that. Further investigation showed that the search would fail to retrieve items for any Workflow Status that has two words in its name (i.e. “Quick Edit”, “Web Signoff”). I reported this to Percussion Tech Support, and they have entered it into their bug tracking system for triage - I’m waiting for confirmation from them as to whether it is a bug or not.

In the meantime, I’ve provided our users with the workflow state ID numbers for the states. Searching on those works correctly, so that is our workaround for now. I also suggested your workaround of retrieving all workflow states and then sorting to find what you need.

-Kathleen