Azure HAPI with Fulltext search

[Artur Mudrytskyi]

Hi everyone,

I deployed a FHIR server container in Azure with the following configuration. Everything seems to work fine — resources are stored properly, and searches by specific fields (like code, given, etc.) return expected results.

However, full-text search using the _content parameter does not work on the Azure instance. The same container and dataset work locally with _content queries as expected.

Has anyone faced this issue?
Any idea what might be missing or misconfigured in the Azure setup?

[James Agnew]

Hi Artur,

I think you'd probably need to elaborate on what "does not work" means in order for anyone to be able to answer this.

Cheers,

James

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[Artur Mudrytskyi]

Hi, thanks for the reply!

To clarify what I mean by "_content search does not work" — here are the exact requests and responses:

✅ When I do a search using a structured parameter:

GET /Patient?family=Rivera

I get 3 matching records (as expected), including Patient.name.family = Rivera.

🟨 When I do a basic search:

GET /Patient

I get 15 records total, including patients named Rivera, Johnson, Jackson, etc.

❌ However, when I try full-text search:

GET /Patient?_content=Rivera

I get an empty result set, even though there are clearly matching resources (e.g. name.family = Rivera, email contains “rivera”).

{ "resourceType": "Bundle", "type": "searchset", "total": 0, "entry": [] }

🔍 The strange part is that when I run the same container locally, _content=Rivera works as expected and returns results.

So the problem seems specific to the Azure container deployment — possibly some missing configuration, volume, or indexing issue.

Let me know if I can provide logs, container settings, or anything else that might help diagnose this.

Thanks again!

[James Agnew]

Probably the first thing to check would be to compare the documents stored in your local elastic to the azure ones. If it looks like you have identical documents in both, then your indexing is good and search is presumably the issue - FullTextSearchSvcImpl would be the right place to drop a breakpoint if you wanted to try investigating the internals of that search.

Cheers,

James

To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/hapi-fhir/03a930c5-0ea0-4167-81e0-8196994511d1n%40googlegroups.com.