Full-Text Search and Variant SKUs

[empirechrome]

We recently started using full-text search on our site, which uses ML 8.1. Many of our items use multiple variants, which all have their own SKU. On those products, I leave the SKU field blank on the "edit product" page in admin, and use the full SKU for "SKU suffix" in the individual variants.

However, I can't get the full-text search to return anything when we search for those SKUs. I have edited the catalog in our SQL manager, so those fields are supposed to be included in the catalog. Any suggestions for how I can get our search to return these variants by SKU?

[empirechrome]

Ok, I've dug into this a little more, and from what I can tell, the stored procedure (GetProducts) that does the search in Storefront by default should be pulling data from both the Product and Variant tables. I'm a novice at SQL, though, so maybe I'm looking at the wrong procedure or could there be a different procedure in charge of the full-text search? Anyone have any ideas?

[gilligan]

Check the forum for the "search bug". Bug has been around for a very long time, I think a couple of years, and hasn't been fixed yet so could be you need to adopt some new SKUs until Vortx get's it fixed.

It can be painful, but you can't use many of the manufacturer's SKUs and may have to change them to something else to get the search to work.

Try it and see if that works. If you have something like Flowcooler 330-180, try changing it to 330180. Kills the SEO and product matching generally, but at least you can get close to finding it if your customer guesses correctly.