feature service layer fullText field index not updated when new features are added

[coryeicher]

Hi,

We have an AGOL hosted feature layer and an exb app Search Widget which searches that layer. We observed that the SW stopped returning features added to this layer, if they were added _after  8/21/2025.

I diagnosed. The layer has Full Text field indexes on 2 fields (which seem to have been added by exb). Also,  I learned that the feature layer `/query` requests issued by exb use the `fullText` syntax, rather than the `where` syntax.

Likely Cause: full text field index was not being updated as new features were added. Again, this started on 8/21. 

Fixes: 

1) I first deleted and recreated the fullText index (on the field I was searching). This (logically) picked up on recently added features... 

... but unfortunately, features added after I re-created the fullText index were still not returned by `fullText` searches/queries.

2) At this point, I am in the middle of confirming whether or not deleting the fullText indexes (on both fields), will solve our issue. It works for existing data, but waiting on new data in our prod system to confirm.

Questions:

1. Is it a known issue that (some) fullText indexes will not be updated correctly when new features are added? Our feature layer was working fine until 8/21.

2. We were unable to reproduce this issue with a "DEV" version of our feature layer, also in AGOL. It's fullText index appears to be updated correctly. It is newer compared to our "prod" layer which is a couple years old.  Are older feature layers known to have issues with fullText field indexes?

3. Deleting fullText indexes trigged cause exb's Search Widget to "fall back" to traditional `&where=blah` , and that is fine for us. By chance, is there a better solution out there?

Thanks,

-Cory

[coryeicher]

Hello,

Update on this. We determined that we need full text searches to support how folks are using our tools.

It is very nice that FT queries return matches for the cases we are required to support. Here are 4 examples, with matches bolded...

• 19222 --> 18711, 19222

• 18777 -->  18777, 19176

• 6174 --> 25-6174

• 29-6174  --> 29-6174

... we see that FT searches match our search terms because (I guess?) the index is splitting at both space ' '  characters and dash '-' characters?

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So, do we know how to fix a full text field index that is not updating when new features are added? We expect it to update automatically. 

Thanks,

-Cory