WebSphere Commerce 7 | Search | Click on Category Pages Failing | CWXFS0010E

After FEP8 migration and when category pages are clicked, it is throwing the following exception,

CWXFS0010E: Failed to execute search request because the current store does not have a valid search configuration.
        at com.ibm.commerce.catalog.facade.client.AbstractCatalogFacadeClient.checkShowCatalogNavigationView(AbstractCatalogFacadeClient.java:1796)
        at com.ibm.commerce.catalog.facade.client.AbstractCatalogFacadeClient.getCatalogNavigationView(AbstractCatalogFacadeClient.java:1827)

And later, I have noticed WC/xml/config/com.ibm.commerce.catalog-ext/wc-search.xml was empty with the following content,



Content of the file:
<_config:cores>
</_config:cores>

I have updated the file with the search-configuration and core information and it started working fine,