Indexing Properties and Nodes for AEM 6.0 and 6.1

Due to the growth of Axis41’s AEM business, we have been spending a lot of time recently both training internal resources and customer development teams on Adobe Experience Manager. During trainings and in conversations with some of them it became clear to me that it would be good to share with the wider AEM developer community. Even if you aren’t new to Adobe Experience Manager/CQ development this still might be useful or a good refresher, and if you are new then you should definitely know how to properly index properties and nodes. Consider this a new year public service announcement.

To index a particular property, create a node directly under your oak:index of type oak:QueryIndexDefinition with the following properties:
name = propertyNames, type String[], value is the name of the property(ies) you want to index
name = type, type String, value = property
name = reindex, type Boolean, value = true

To index entire nodes so that you don’t have to list all their property names (for example, if they are coming from an outside source and you don’t know them all ahead of time), you have to do different things depending on if you are on 6.0 or 6.1. The following steps concern indexing nodes (and their properties) in the DAM, but they should work for general cases:

For 6.1:

1. In CRXDE Lite, navigate to this path: /oak:index/damAssetLucene/aggregates/dam:Asset. You should see a list of nodes with names that start with “include” and then a number.
2. To this list, add a new node of type nt:unstructured that follows the same naming convention and a new number one higher than the current highest (for example, if “include7” is the highest number with 7 then make a node with the name “include8”). The name probably doesn’t matter but we don’t tempt fate around here.
3. Add a property to this node with the name “path” with a String value set to “”, for example: “jcr:content/metadata”.
4. Click Save All.
5. Navigate up the tree to /oak:index/damAssetLucene.
6. Change the value of the “reindex” property on this node to “true”. This should perform a reindex on the repository.

For 6.0:

1. In CRXDE Lite, find the node /oak:index.
2. Under the oak:index node, create a new node of type oak:QueryIndexDefinition with the name “damAssetLucene”.
3. Set the following properties on this new node:
   1. Name: async, type: String, Value: async
   2. Name: compatVersion, type: Long, Value: 1
   3. Name: evaluatePathRestrictions, type: Boolean, Value: true
   4. Name: reindex, type: Boolean, Value: false (you don’t want to trigger a reindex yet!)
   5. Name: type, type: String, Value: lucene
4. Click Save All.
5. Under the damAssetLucene node you just created, create a new node of type nt:unstructured with the name “aggregates”.
6. Click Save All.
7. Under the aggregates node you just created, create a new node of type nt:unstructured with the name “dam:Asset”.
8. Click Save All.
9. Under the dam:Asset node you just created, create a new node of type nt:unstructured with the name “include0”.
10. Add a property to the include0 node with the name “path” with a String value set to “”, for example: “jcr:content/metadata”.
11. Click Save All.
12. Navigate back up the tree to the damAssetLucene node you created earlier.
13. Change the value of the “reindex” property on this node to “true”. This should perform a reindex on the repository.

The key thing to note here is that you are replicating some of the same node structure on 6.0 that already exists by default on 6.1, but the compatVersion property is set to 2 in 6.1 and must be set to 1 on 6.0.

With the transition to Jackrabbit Oak, a lot of people are still working out what the best practice is for indexing Oak nodes; this may not be the definitive way to do indexing for properties and nodes in AEM, but it is one way we have found that seems to work well. If you know of a better way then please let us know by tweeting us at @axis41 or emailing info@aempodcast.com.