Error Message

Error seen when adding Hotwords that include certain special characters:

Special characters are not allowed.

Error seen when adding terms that include certain special characters to the Search Subject or Content fields:

Special characters are not allowed in search keyword and hotword name.

Certain non-alphanumeric special characters are typically not indexed by Enterprise Vault (EV) and may result in unexpected Search results or performance issues.

There are no plans to address this issue by way of a patch or hotfix in earlier versions of the software at the present time.  However, the issue has been addressed in the revision of the product specified at the end of this article. 
 
Please contact your Sales representative or the Sales group for upgrade information including upgrade eligibility to the release containing the resolution for this issue.

This issue is fixed in the following release(s), available in the Download Center at https://www.veritas.com/support:
- Enterprise Vault 15.1.1

While this is considered to be expected behavior, the VAS UI background processing has been modified to allow the use of specific non-alphanumeric characters. This is a 2-part process:

Part 1 - Upgrade to the version containing the fix, or a higher version, as listed above.

Part 2 - Edit a JSON file to list the required special characters. Here are the steps:

1. Stop the Enterprise Vault Accelerator Manager Service and the IIS Admin Service on the CA/VAS server.

2. Use File Explorer to browse to the appsettings.json file located at \Enterprise Vault Business Accelerator\SupervisionWeb\. Make a backup copy of this file in an alternate location for safekeeping (rename with today's date).

3. Edit the appsettings.json file to add the following section line to the end of the file before the closing brace (}) and list any required special characters that may be needed for use in Hotwords or Search Terms. Be sure to separate each special character with a space and enclose the list in double quotes. Note that each section is listed in a comma-separated list, hence the need to prefix the line with a comma. The following special characters are used in the examples below: @ ' - & _.

3.1. For CA/VAS 15.1.1:

,"AllowedSpecialCharsInSearch": "@ ' - & _"

3.2. For CA/VAS 15.1.2 and higher:

,"SpecialCharsAllowedInSearch": "@ ' - & _"

3.3. Here is an example of an edited CA/VAS 15.1.2 appsettings.json file:

{
  "Logging": {
    "LogLevel": {
      "Default": "Debug",
      "System": "Information",
      "Microsoft": "Information"
    }
  },
  "AllowedHosts": "*",
  "SupervisionApiEndPoint": "http://localhost:82/api",
  "VeritasTechnicalSupportLink": "https://www.veritas.com/support",
  "WindowsSessionExpirationInSeconds": "21600",
  "HelpDocumentationUrl": "../../assets/documentation/{currentLang}/index.html",
  "StatsPollingIntervalInSecForItemSizeInKbLessThan250": "2",
  "StatsPollingIntervalInSecForItemSizeInKbGreaterThan250": "3",
  "ProductType": "2",
  "CSPHeaderValue": "default-src 'self';script-src 'self' 'unsafe-inline' 'unsafe-eval' https:; style-src 'self' 'unsafe-inline'; img-src 'self' data:  *.giphy.com  blob: *.office.net  https://*; font-src 'self' data:;connect-src 'self'  ws: wss: *.giphy.com *.office.net *.linkpreview.net *.cloudflare.com *.blob.core.windows.net https://*; media-src 'self' *.giphy.com blob: *.office.net *.linkpreview.net *.blob.core.windows.net;frame-src 'self'; form-action 'self'; base-uri 'self' *.linkpreview.net; frame-ancestors 'self'; object-src 'self'; manifest-src 'self'; worker-src 'self';"
,"SpecialCharsAllowedInSearch": "@ ' - & _"
}

4. Save and close the appsettings.json file. Can make another backup copy of the edited file in an alternate location for safekeeping (rename with today's date and the word EDITED).

5. Start the IIS Admin Service and then the Enterprise Vault Accelerator Manager Service on the CA/VAS server.

Known issues with certain special characters

The following is a non-exhaustive list of special characters that are known to cause issues and should not be added to the appsettings.json file as allowed characters:

- Some special characters, such as a dot or period (.), will cause the Special characters are not allowed. message to be automatically listed when creating a new Search or adding a new Hotword.

- Parentheses ((, )), Brackets ([, ]) and Braces ({, }) can cause a new Search page to be blank and can cause the new Hotword pane to not display correctly.

- Specific arithmetic operators, such as the plus sign (+), can cause a new Search page to be blank and can cause the new Hotword pane to not display correctly.

Please note that whilst certain special characters are are allowed to be entered in the VAS UI as above, tests shoudl be run to ascertain Searches return the expected results. It may be that some special characters may sometimes return unexpected results in Searches or Hotword Analysis. Note that is is mot permitted to use a special character by itself as a Hotword - it is required to have 3 leading characters.

See Related Articles below for a list of special characters eligible for searches.