SharePoint 2010 Search runs through your items in your SharePoint environment and grabs a good amount of information per item. The Search Results page for your search can be modified to include additional data, such as your custom property fields, but it requires some Central Admin tweaking.
Within your search results, you are going to have the basic information such as Title, Author, brief description, link to item, etc. Moving beyond that, we have to start using Managed Properties and Crawled Properties combo.
Crawled Properties are the individual metadata fields that are extracted per item. The Managed Properties are what are displayed within the search results and what are used within the Refinement Panel. You can can group multiple Crawled Properties within Managed Properties to give a better refined search experience. This is how we are going to be displaying our custom properties.
To view crawled property categories
- Verify that the user account that is performing this procedure is a member of the Farm Administrators group.
- Open SharePoint 2010 Central Administration.
- On the Central Administration home page, click Manage service applications.
- On the Service Applications page, click the Search service application that you want to view.
- On the Search Administration page, on the Quick Launch, in the Queries and Results section, click Metadata Properties.
- On the Metadata Property Mappings page, click Categories. The crawled property categories are displayed.
Now we got that out the way, you need to understand only managed properties are available for search queries. If the custom property is a crawled property, you must map it to a managed property for your custom properties to display.
The downside for adding your custom properties to the search results is that you have to have some foresight within the naming convention of the field you want to display. The crawled properties will be a BEAR to try and hunt and peck for the correct property field you want to display within your search results.
- Generate a new Managed Property with Central Admin.
- Add your Crawled Property of your custom property to that new Managed Property
- Kick off a full crawl
- Modify the Fetched Property of the search results page
- Add the new Managed Property to the Fetch Property field to return the custom property within the search results
- View the search result XML to verify
- Repeat?
You may have to do a couple of round trips back into Central Admin and play around with the Crawled and Managed Properties to accurately get the fields you want to display.
With patience and/or planning on how to name your columns for the future will ease the pain of trying to find your custom properties you need to find.
References
- Managed Properties (http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff621097(v=office.14).aspx)
- Crawled Properties (http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh134087(v=office.14).aspx)
- Returned Search Results Properties (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/LIBRary/ms560074(v=office.14).aspx)
- Customizing Search Results (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee819886(v=office.14).aspx)
- View search result XML (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms546985.ASPX)