Phantom documents

We recently had a situation where there were a lot more documents in the db than visible.  This can happen when the document’s Readers field has a particular name/role not assigned to anybody. In our case though the db did not have any Readers controlled form. We had to recover /delete those documents (we later found out that a user had accidentally copied documents from another db(which was readers controlled) and pasted here).
The simplest way to resolve this is to use the Full access administrator feature and read all documents, but, what if you do not have that luxury?

Here is how you recover those docs having just Manager access to the db.

• Create a new view in the db to show all docs (select @all)
• Add a categorized column $Readers as the value. This would add categories for all the readers fields used in the db
• Spot the categories without any documents and note the category name
• If the category is a role, add it as part of the current db’s acl with access to yourself

All documents would magically appear again to be processed /deleted.

This technique can be used to troubleshoot so many other Readers field issues.