Configuring and customizing SharePoint 2010 search

Part 1: Configure basic search
Part 2: Metadata and faceted search
Part 3: Tie in additional facets
Part 4: Customize the results
Part 5: Add a field to the advanced search filter

Part 1: Configure Search

1) Load Central Admin
2) Click Manage Service Applications
3) Click New –> Search Service Application

4) Specify the
- Name
- Service Account
- App Pools
There are no real gotcha’s here.
5) Select the newly created service application and click ‘Manage’

6) Click content sources, drop the context menu down on ‘Local SharePoint sites’ and choose edit
7) Set Full and incremental crawl schedules and start a full crawl.
If you go back to your site (after the crawl completes!) you’ll get results.

So, that’s search results but that’s pretty dull right. So the next task is to show search facets.

Part 2: Metadata and Faceted Search

) Go to your site settings and select the Term Store Management option

2) Add a new Group, Term Set and Terms, if you have problems here make sure the account you are logged in is in the list of Term Store Administrators (page right) – even if you’re logged in as the farm admin. I’m using Customers as my term set as per:

3) Add site columns for the metadata we’ll add to the document content type. Go to Site Settings –> Site Columns and add a site column called Customer
4) Make the new site column a Managed Metadata type and select the relevant node of your term store ala:

Now we want to associate those columns with the document content type.
6) Back to Site Settings –> select Site Content Types, now click on the Document content type
7) Add the two metadata fields we just added to the content type and you should have something like:

8) Ok so we now have our new document type and we should (after the next crawl) see the effect of this in search results. So to force that go to central admin, manage the search application, select the default scope (if that’s when you have) and start a (full) crawl.
So, now when we search what do we see?
Well, the results are obviously the same but now SharePoint has automatically picked up one of our metadata fields and allowed a faceted search filter on that:

So, that’s nice but where is that other column? Basically SharePoint doesn’t add it because it’s a not a metadata field (there a refinement in the box to automatically pick these up), it also has almost infinite possible values and SharePoint wouldn’t know how to categorise those values in a way that would add value. In the next part we’ll add that Sales Potential Field as a facet.

Part 3: Tie in additional facets

Jump back into Central Admin, from there manage your search application

2) Select the Metadata Properties under the section “Queries and Results”

3) Click “New Managed Property”

Call the property “SalesValue”
Set the type to “Decimal” (mapping to currency)
In the “Mappings to crawled properties” area search for the crawled field we created earlier (NOTE: the field will have been renamed internally by SharePoint because it’s a decimal it gets a text equivalent field and the actual decimal value is placed in this newly named field)

Now we have that field available to us in search we can go ahead and define how we should use it. If you go back to your site and do a search you’ll be on the results.aspx page and it’s this page we want to change…

1) Edit the page

2) Edit the “Refinement Panel” web part on the left hand side (toward the bottom of the page) and expand the “Refinement” node.

3) VERY IMPORTANT: Unclick the “Use Default Configuration” option!!!

4) Add XML display the new managed property…

Now because the new property is a decimal value there are a few things we want to do and some just to be aware of. Firstly, we don’t just want to show the value itself we will want to categorise the values into meaningful bands i.e. High Value Medium Value, Low Value, we can do this quite easily but the thing to be aware of is that most example you’ll see out there use a syntax like:

</CustomFilter>

That’s no good for a decimal value because what search will do is apply that filter almost exactly as it shows and because it’s comparing a decimal it’ll get all confused about those dots in between the numbers! You get something like: “Property doesn’t exist or is used in a manner inconsistent with schema settings.” – you’ll also get that if you’ve come this far without creating the field as a managed property. So what we’re going to do is specify a lower and upper threshold for the original value. The full XML for the display of the SalesValue field will now become:

<Category Title="Sales Potential" Description="Allows refinement by saleable value" Type="Microsoft.Office.Server.Search.WebControls.ManagedPropertyFilterGenerator"

MetadataThreshold="3" NumberOfFiltersToDisplay="4" MaxNumberOfFilters="0" ShowMoreLink="True" MappedProperty="SalesValue"

MoreLinkText="show more" LessLinkText="show fewer" SortBy="Custom" ShowCounts="Count">

</CustomFilter>

</CustomFilter>

</CustomFilter>

</CustomFilter>

</CustomFilter>

</CustomFilter>

</CustomFilters>

</Category>

5) In the “Filter Category Definition” box, copy out the contents to a useful editor (Visual Studio works for me)

6) Combine the XML snippet above with the XML that was already in the textbox, for reference I added my XML just above the Managed Metadata column. Save the changes are re-query.

Done! You should now see something like the following and be able to refine search on the facet we just created:

Part 4: Customize search results

1) Edit the “Search Core Results” web part by editing the search results page

2) Uncheck the “Use Location Visualization” option within the “Display Properties” node

3) Copy the text out of the “Fetched Properties” text box and edit it to add out new field:

<Column Name="SalesValue"/>

</Columns>

This will make the property available (although when I tested it without the entry it still worked!)

4) Now edit the same web part (if you closed it down) and load the XSL Editor from the “Display Properties” node and copy the XSLT out into an editor.

5) Add the SalesValue to the search results by editing the XSLT. It quite a large file but essestially you’re just looking for the “results” match. Now you’ve found that you should be able to see the method that’s been employed to render the results. I’m going to add a new template to output out field. Here I’m just copying the string template with minor changes:

<xsl:template name="DisplaySalesValue">

<xsl:param name="str" />

<xsl:if test='string-length($str) > 0'>

<b>Sales Value: $<xsl:value-of select="$str" /></b>

</xsl:if>

</xsl:template>

.6) Now add a call to that template to output the value at the end of the metadata area of search results. To do this I’ve popped back up to the results match we found earlier and directly after the file size output I’ve added a call to the new template:

<xsl:call-template name="DisplayAuthors">

<xsl:call-template name="DisplaySalesValue">

<xsl:with-param name="str" select="salesvalue" />

</xsl:call-template>

</div>

And here’s an example of the output:

Part 5: Add a field to the advanced search filter

Finally lets make that Sales Value property available in advanced search.
1) Do a search and go to the advanced search page, edit the page and edit the “Advanced Search Box” web part…

2) Copy out the “Properties” XML to your favourite editor and add the property definition thus:

  <PropertyDefs>

      <PropertyDef Name="Path" DataType="text" DisplayName="URL"/>

      .    <PropertyDef Name="SalesValue" DataType="integer" DisplayName="Sales Value"/>

  </PropertyDefs>

3) Then add a reference to the field in the “All Results” set thus:

    <ResultType DisplayName="All Results" Name="default">

      <KeywordQuery/>

      <PropertyRef Name="Author" />

      <PropertyRef Name="SalesValue" />

    </ResultType>

Now that really is it, you should now be able to do any kind of search (normal or advanced anyway!) and have access to the managed properties and metadata fields we created:

Handy tips

The following XSLT will show you all the XML that is returned from search so you can check that your properties are being returned correctly:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>

<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0" xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform">

<xsl:output method="xml" version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" indent="yes"/>

<xsl:template match="/">

<xmp><xsl:copy-of select="*"/></xmp>

</xsl:template>

</xsl:stylesheet>

Have a play around with the refinement syntax, it’s quite smart and I have a feeling it’s going to come in handy on coded applications!
For example:

http://noonscape/Search/results.aspx?k=test&r=salesvalue>=”200000” salesvalue>”49999″http://noonscape/Search/results.aspx?k=sharepoint&r= salesvalue<=”10000000″ AND salesvalue>”500000″

SharePoint Admin

Saturday, 15 February 2014

Configuring and customizing SharePoint 2010

Part 1: Configure Search

Part 2: Metadata and Faceted Search

Part 3: Tie in additional facets

Part 4: Customize search results

Part 5: Add a field to the advanced search filter

Handy tips

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