End-of-life for Solr6-based Search (Alfresco Search Services and Insight Engine) Service

In the February 2026 newsletter, Hyland announced an important roadmap update for Alfresco Content Services. Announcement is specifically very important for Alfresco Search Service/Insight Engine. The Solr6-based Alfresco Search Service is being retired.

Key points (In case Alfresco community version users missed) as per the newsletter:

• End-of-life for Solr6-based search (Alfresco Search Services and Insight Engine) will occur with ACS 26.1, expected around mid-March 2026.

• ACS 25.x will be the final version supporting Solr6 (supposedly).

Replacement: 

• Alfresco Search Enterprise - powered by Elasticsearch/OpenSearch

What’s important for Alfresco Content Services Community Edition?

The ACS 26 Community Edition will initially continue using Apache Solr6 based Search Service (2.x most probably), but a future Alfresco Content Services Community release is expected to transition to Elasticsearch/OpenSearch as well.

Unlock a node in Alfresco which could not be unlocked

I had an issue recently when i was trying to edit a word document. I deleted the working copy node somehow. I have no clues how it happend. But this word document node was locked foreever. Cancel checkout action was always failing. I was not able to cancel checkout and unlock the node.

While i was investigating the issue, i looked for the nodeRef of the word document via node browser. I found that it had cm:checkedOut aspect (because i checkedOut for edit oboviously).

I thought removing the aspect and unlocking will solve my problem. I tried to remove cm:checkedOut aspect from the node via repository js webscript but it failed. 

In my further investigation i reviewed, org.alfresco.service.cmr.coci.CheckOutCheckInService.cancelCheckout(NodeRef) method defintion in CheckOutCheckInService class:

public NodeRef cancelCheckout(NodeRef workingCopyNodeRef);

It indicated that, it expects workingCopyNode in order to cancel the checkout.

To unlock the node i have to somehow remove the cm:checkout aspect and then unlock the node. 

When i investigated more in logs (enabled the debug log on org.alfresco.repo.coci package), i saw that on click of Cancel Checkout, a backend behavior (org.alfresco.repo.coci.CheckOutCheckInServicePolicies.BeforeCancelCheckOut) was stopping the process. The below given method seemd to be validating working copy node by firing org.alfresco.repo.coci.CheckOutCheckInServicePolicies.BeforeCancelCheckOut.beforeCancelCheckOut(NodeRef) behavior.

org.alfresco.repo.coci.CheckOutCheckInServiceImpl.invokeBeforeCancelCheckOut(NodeRef)

The above validation was happening before the unlock (org.alfresco.service.cmr.lock.LockService.unlock(NodeRef, boolean, boolean)) method call. 

So i decided to disable the behaviors and then unlock the node followed by aspect removal. Here is the fix:

function main () { 
 //using the string nodeRef of the word document which was locked.
 var nodeRef = search.findNode("workspace://SpacesStore/7c093a3d-c16e-416d-8087-9ccd93aa2a06");
 var webContext = Packages.org.springframework.web.context.ContextLoader.getCurrentWebApplicationContext();
 var behaviourFilter = webContext.getBean("policyBehaviourFilter", org.alfresco.repo.policy.BehaviourFilter);
  
 // Disable all behaviors, so we can remove the aspect without any validations
 behaviourFilter.disableAllBehaviours();
 // Remove cm:checkedOut aspect and try to unlock the node which was not getting unlocked due to behavior validations
 nodeRef.removeAspect("cm:checkedOut");
 nodeRef.unlock();
 // Enable all the behaviors
 behaviourFilter.enableAllBehaviours(); 

}

main();