I'm trying to add new field to an External Content Type(ECT) and it is not being discovered after a full crawl so that I can map it to a new Managed Property consumed by FastSearch. These are the steps:
1. In SharePoint designer, delete the existing ECT which is mapped to a SQL Server table.
2. Recreate the ECT by pointing to the same SQL table with the updated schema. Create Read Item and Read List operation using all default values. The updated schema is reflected for the ECT in the SharePoint designer.
3. I tried initially tried to do an incremental crawl here, but since it wasn't showing.
4. Do an Index Reset in Central Admin for the content source. I also ran Clear-FastSearchContentCollection on the FastSearch server.
5. Initiate a full crawl. The property still wasn't discovered.
6. I found that while searching for a solution to this problem this post that if the new property contains null values it can be ignored during the crawl. I updated the ECT's underlying table so that there were no null values.
7. Repeat steps 4 & 5. Still no property, but the previous properties of the ECT are there.
8. Repeat steps 1,2,4,5. No luck.
Any ideas? I have successfully added new fields to an ECT before using the same steps described above, with one difference being they were strings and this one is Int32. I initially used Int16, but thought this may be a problem so switched to Int32 because I saw some existing ECT's that had that datatype. My next step is to try making it nvarchar in the underlying table, but that seems like a shot in the dark. I see no errors noted in the crawl history. Is there somewhere else where I can look to troubleshoot why the new field is not being discovered? Also I ensured that the category has autodiscovery on crawl is checked and that crawlable in Business Connectivity Service.