Workaround for Sitecore Content Editor search issues

Posted 7 Mar 2021 by Marek Musielak

Recently I encountered a strange issue. Search tab in Sitecore Content Editor stopped working, but only for content authors. For admins everything worked as before. My first guess was "access rights" but that wasn't it. The problem was with how Sitecore builds Solr query when users use Search tab in Sitecore Content Editor.

I opened Sitecore search log to see what query is sent to Solr and I saw this:

I realized that Sitecore sends every single role assigned to user directly or indirectly, along with the query to check if user has Read access to search results. And in effect, request sent to Solr exceeded maximum request length. A bit of googling and I had an answer - find solr\server\etc\jetty.xml file and set bigger value for solr.jetty.request.header.size property:

<Set name="requestHeaderSize">
  <Property name="solr.jetty.request.header.size" default="32768" />
</Set>

Interesting thing - in one Sitecore installation I just got 0 results message:.

While in the other I got There is a technical issue with the search provider and no results have been returned. Please try again later. For more details, see the log files. message:

I know that it's not really a solution, it's rather workaround, but still in some situations it may save you a headache.