Basic Search – Metadata Property Mappings

Basic Search – Metadata Property Mappings header image

As mentioned in the last post about Search, in the following posts there will be some more advanced features. In this post there will be some details about the your search properties (and using them in your URL). While in the next post there will be some info about the Search Result Hidden Object, that allows you to sort your complete result set (and not only by the default relevance option).

Depending on how you use your SharePoint environments you can either choose for standard search WebParts (giving you only the options described in the previous post) or create your own webparts (described in the next post). Whatever option you may choose you will have to deal with showing information in you result set. Something that is easily obtained through the use of Metadata property mappings. This is a nice feature hidden in your SSP under search settings. It contains a list of properties on your environment, and the possibility to make a new one (making new ones allows you to map them to the BDC or other values existing on your environments).

Each item has a nice checkbox “Use in scopes” checking it will not only allow you to use this property to exclude/include items based on the property value but also allows it to be used in your URL. <

Small example: Most of you knows that passing the ?k=Test parameter to your search page will get a result set containing the keyword test. Passing the next url to your search page will not only get items containing the keyword test, but also match the Author : ?k=test+Author:"SystemAccount"

Each managed metadata property you create can be used within your URL to filter down search results (actually it’s how Faceted Search works). Knowing that unleashes a lot of potential to your search solutions. A small real live example: >You have a WebPart that gets items and folders. By searching in that WebPart you get redirected too your search page with a custom scope and you have the search results you want (easy doable with a k=<textbox value>&s=<set property>.

Now we would like to search not only the scope (that contains all items), but also we would like to search within a folder , the trick here is finding the metadata property containing the url (or folder in our case). Besides the fact that it took ages to find out what property it was, it’s pretty simple. The property seems to be Basic:9, so we made a new Metadata property and mapped it to Basic:9, that leaves us with a property containing the URL and all we had to do was to expand our k=<textbox value> with a +MetadataProppertyContainingBasic:9:"<the current folder>". That actually returns only items of the folder where in.

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