I was recently approached with a request to find all the content that has been created by a particular user in our Alfresco repository.  At first this seemed like a simple request, surely there is a way to view the user account through the Explorer or Share interface and see everything they have created.  Not so, unfortunately.  The Share interface will show you content created recently, but only goes back a short amount of time.  The Explorer interface will allow an admin to see how much disk a user has consumed, but not all of their individual pieces of content.  So, how do we find what we're looking for?

The answer lies in Alfresco's robust search capabilities.  Everything in Alfresco is a node, and you can search on any property of those nodes if you know the document model and the search syntax.  To further complicate things Alfresco offers several search options, each with its own pros/cons and syntax.  Perhaps the most powerful and useful of these is the Lucene search.  There are a few ways to execute a Lucene search in Alfresco.  In this case I chose to use the Alfresco Node Browser.  This console can be accessed at the following URL on your Alfresco installation:

https://<your_server_name>/alfresco/faces/jsp/admin/node-browser.jsp

Once you have signed in and can see the node browser, one of the first things to take note of is the "Search" section at the top of the page.  The drop down menu provided allows you to specify the type of search desired.  For this example, select "Lucene".  Lucene has its own search syntax, some of which is documented in the Alfresco Wiki.    There is also an excellent presentation up on SlideShare that details the various Alfresco search options and has some great examples of how to search for Node aspects, properties, etc using Lucene.

OK, so I know I want to use Lucene to search my repository, I know what property I am looking for (creator), I know what value I need that property to have (the user's login) and I have the Node Browser page loaded.  What's the exact string to search for?  In Lucene, the syntax for searching for nodes that have a certain property value is simple.

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@<property_qname>\:"property_value"

So, back to my original request.  I need all the documents created by user "John Q. Public", who has the login of "johnqpublic".  

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@<creator>\:"johnqpublic"

Pretty simple, right?  This same syntax can be applied to search for nodes with any property value in the Alfresco Repository.