Hello,
I am a developer currently evaluating XWiki as a possible replacement for a large Confluence instance. During this evaluation, I noticed some inconsistencies in the Solr search results and since we’ll have many users, pages, and access restrictions, this behavior could potentially affect user confidence in the platform. I would appreciate some guidance on this from the XWiki community
Issue description: When I search for the name of a custom class as a registered non-admin user, I see the following:
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The filter/facet count on the right side shows 19 results.
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Page 1 says “Results 1–10 of 18”, but displays only 9 results.
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Page 2 says “Results 11–17 of 17” and displays 7 results.
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Therefore, only 16 results are actually displayed, while the interface reports 19, 18, and 17 results at different points.
When searching the same class name as an admin, all 19 results are correctly displayed and there are no missing results in pagination. Therefore I assume these inconsistencies result from view rights.
I have already investigated and found:
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Open issue: XWIKI-8583, concerning pagination holes when inaccessible results are filtered after the Solr query. [jira.xwiki.org]
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Open issue: XWIKI-13089, concerning facet counts that do not account for rights filtering. [jira.xwiki.org]
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And some suggested workarounds involving global search exclusions. Unfortunately, global exclusions would not be suitable for our use case because restricted content should still be searchable by authorized users,
I understand that XWiki checks view rights after retrieving results from Solr and that making Solr fully permission-aware has performance implications.
My main remaining questions are therefore:
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To help us assess this limitation as part of our XWiki evaluation, is addressing the open Jira issues currently on the roadmap?
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Is there a recommended access-rights design for large XWiki installations that reduces these search inconsistencies? For example, would primarily assigning view rights through groups, rather than assigning them directly to individual users or individual pages, enable a more reliable or efficient permission-aware search approach?
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Is there a supported workaround for avoiding the inconsistencies that’s suitable for a large installation with granular permissions? And if not, what approach would the XWiki team recommend us to implement to avoid presenting misleading counts and seemingly broken pagination to users?
Thank you in advance for your time, and appreciate all the work you’ve put into XWiki!