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FDAEMON_W_EMPTYWORDLIST
Filter daemon produced an empty word list
FDAEMON_W_EMPTYWORDLIST is HRESULT 267909 (0x00041685) from Indexing Service. AllStat describes it as “Final wordlist was empty.” The severity bit indicates a nonfailure result, but the value carries a specific condition that must not be collapsed into plain S_OK.
In the legacy Indexing Service or IFilter pipeline, this result means that final wordlist was empty. The high-level request can be considered complete after it only when its documented postcondition has been checked.
Where the status is encountered
- Legacy Indexing Service catalog processing; log the exact method and object state instead of interpreting the constant outside that contract.
- IFilter text and property extraction; log the exact method and object state instead of interpreting the constant outside that contract.
- Search enumeration, scan scheduling, or catalog administration; log the exact method and object state instead of interpreting the constant outside that contract.
Because it is informational, a language binding may expose it as success and hide the symbolic distinction. Keep the original HRESULT available until the code-specific branch has run.
Evidence and telemetry
- preserve document type and byte length.
- preserve filter CLSID.
- preserve language identifier.
- preserve word-breaker and noise-word configuration.
- preserve token counts before and after filtering.
Also record fdaemon_w_emptywordlist_operation, fdaemon_w_emptywordlist_state_before, fdaemon_w_emptywordlist_state_after, UTC time, process and thread identifiers, component version, and a correlation ID. Protect user data in logs and keep only the identifiers required to reproduce component state.
What must be true before accepting it
Verify that the document or query legitimately contains no indexable tokens after filtering, language analysis, and stop-word processing. The verification prevents it from being promoted to broader success than the producing API promised.
The component may have changed durable or in-memory state before returning it; inspect that state first.
Correct handling and recovery
Preserve the source and language configuration, then determine whether empty output is expected. Fix filter loading, encoding, or word-breaker selection only when the input should contain searchable terms.
Retry it only when a documented input or state has changed. Retry policy must follow the owning state machine rather than a generic transient-error loop.
Difference from nearby results
It must be distinguished from ordinary S_OK and from failure-severity values in the same API family; its documented state changes control the next action.
The nearby-status comparison controls whether outputs are usable and whether more work is expected.
Practical scenario
A document containing only punctuation and stop words produces an empty final word list. The indexer records the language and accepts the empty result rather than retrying the same filter.
A regression test should reproduce it, assert the relevant outputs and state, then change only the decisive condition and verify the expected neighboring result or ordinary completion.
References
- Microsoft: Filter interface values — official Microsoft material used to interpret it.
- Microsoft: About Indexing Service filters
- Microsoft: Using custom filters
- Microsoft: HRESULT values
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