Having Guest access to a document - should this allow users to search for this document?
I am working with an Alfresco customer that has content that has the "Guest" permission on entire spaces within Alfresco.
But they claim that Alfresco search does not allow users to find this content using Alfresco Search, even though if they were to have the URL directly, they would in fact be able to open and view this content.
Google Drive has a similar behavior to this referred to as Link Sharing:
So in Google Drive, you can have access to a document but only if you have the URL to the document.
Does this same sort of thing exist in alfresco?
I am using the CMIS api to access alfresco document metadata.
Is there some "anyone-with-link" property/metadata that I should be using to determine if I should allow the document to be indexed in search or not?
Yes, Alfresco has functionality called "quick share" which allows anyone with the link to access the document. That is not the same thing has having Guest access on a space or on a document.
However, I am confused about your question because everything gets indexed into Solr regardless of permissions, unless it has the index control aspect set on it, which would have had to have been added to explicitly exclude the object from being indexed.
Maybe what your customer means is that logging in as Guest in Alfresco Share or via CMIS is not supported.
Bottom-line is if your application is using a non-Guest service account to make the CMIS calls, it should be able to do whatever searches or queries it needs to to find the documents, provided the service account has permission to see the results.