Searching across every field is going to yield lower performance than a properly structured query against the fields you actually want to check. The only way to achieve this is to use the GroupedOr statement, passing in each field and term you want to search against.

As for lacking documentation, both Shannon and myself have full time jobs too, things get done when things get done.

I also was looking for a way to search through all fields using the API to use wildcard operations.

I couldn't find any example so I wrote it myself where you don't need to list the properties yourself staticly.

For any other that needs to search through every property with the API, here's an example:

string search = "toSearchFor*";

List<PropertyType> types = PropertyType.GetAll().ToList();

List<string> fields = types.Select(pt => pt.Alias).Distinct().ToList();
fields.Add("nodeName");

var searcher = ExamineManager.Instance.SearchProviderCollection["ContentSearcher"];
var criteria = searcher.CreateSearchCriteria(BooleanOperation.Or);
var query = criteria.GroupedOr(fields, search.MultipleCharacterWildcard());

var results = searcher.Search(query.Compile());

This searches every field (and every property that's added later) with wildcard search.

My search searched less than 200 documents (and it won't be expanding so much) and went quite fast. But as slace said it could yield lower performance when searching through lots of documents.

I know this is an old question, but in V8 you don't have to load the PropertyTypes. You can get all fields in the index if you convert it to a LuceneSearcher like so:

if((searcher is Examine.LuceneEngine.Providers.LuceneSearcher luceneSearcher))
{
    allFields = luceneSearcher.GetAllIndexedFields();
    var query = criteria.GroupedOr(allFields, terms);
}

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