Symptoms

When searching on phrases in the document description that containing dashes (e.g. "some-test" or "-hello"), unexpected search results are returned (for example, all documents that have the word hello without the dash are also returned).

Background

Worldox treats certain characters as "stop characters" - these are interpreted as if they were spaces (i.e. word separators), and are stripped out of the indexes and search criteria.  So a search for "some-test" gets translated into "the word 'some' immediately followed by the word 'test'.

Resolution

If dashes are an important part of your search strategy (some firms use keywords prefixed with a dash to indicate keyword vs regular descriptive text), removing the dash from the stop characters list is the solution.  Here's how:

Important: This procedure can take awhile (several hours) - please plan accordingly as users will not be able to perform indexed based searches while the rebuild is happening

1. From WDIndex, click Close Server
2. From the main WDINDEX menu, click Text->Word Rules->Indexable Characters
3. Locate the Dash entry in the list and place a checkmark next to it
4. Click OK
5. Back in the main Indexer dialog, click Update->Text Database
6. Choose Initialize and Create Text database, click OK
7. Your text indexes will be recreated, taking dashes into account
8. After the rebuild completes, click OK, then completely close WDINDEX
9. Re-launch WDIndex using the Indexer Autostart shortcut on your desktop (or in the Start->Startup folder on the PC)

You should now be able to perform searches using dashes.