SharePoint search can crawl managed metadata fields, and it stores the values inside a Text search property. But what are the values stored there? What format are they in? Do they contain the path to the term/s, etc?
Well, the project I’m working on needed me to retrieve some managed metadata fields from the REST search API. Continue reading “Get the text out of a Managed Metadata Search Property”
If you’re a SharePoint developer like me, you probably find the Query Throttle in SharePoint an absolute pain. This is a feature where, under an unnecessarily complicated set of conditions, if you try to ask for too many list items in one query, SharePoint refuses.
Now, while I understand why such a limit is necessary – albeit I’d rather it was simpler – it is something of a problem. For example, multi-choice columns cannot be indexed. If you want to query such a column, and there are more than 5000 items in the list, we’ll, you’re outta luck.
That situation is surprisingly common in Document Management systems. Continue reading “"Minor" Search limitations in Office 365”
I have found an gotchya with Content Approval and Office 365 Search, specifically around draft item security. Embarrassingly, it did take me a while to work out that this was what was going on.
You can use content approval to allow only certain users – such as editors and approvers – the right to see draft items. However, if you do this, then the Search Crawl Account – which normally only has ‘read’ access – cannot see the draft documents to index them. Thus, draft documents that are visible to editors or approvers only never appear in the search results. Continue reading “Content Approval and Office 365 Search”
Following Part I, I did some more tests. It was a similar format to last time, but I though it worth looking at the results, and I also spoke to Microsoft Support about this latency question. Continue reading “Office 365 Search Latency – Part 2”
I’ve had to look into Search latency in Office 365 for one of our customers. This is the time taken between a document being uploaded into Office 365 and it being available in Search. The results are interesting, though do raise a few more questions. Continue reading “Office 365 Search Latency”
The customer I was with last week, like many others, wanted their search results to appear in a table form – like a List View, in fact.
Now, I’ve written the XSL to do this for various solutions over the years, but they had found a CodePlex project for this – SharePoint 2010 Search Results in Tabular Format. This project has a feature I’d not managed to write, or had seen working before – column titles that were sortable and filterable:
That’s pretty neat. And it’s all XSL. You can, if you edit the XSL and the Columns you get back from search, show, sort, and filter other columns of data.
One observation I would make is that this XSL does not format Hit Highlighting – that is, matches aren’t shown as strong, and the summary doesn’t contain any ellipsises [ … ] characters. However, you could easily add these from the ‘standard’ XSL to get hit highlighting working again.
So, related to my previous post, we had problems initially deleting the Search Service Application. The Search Content Application’s Database had become ‘Suspect’. I’ve had this happen a few times before (I’m not sure why – I ain’t a DB Admin) and I have a little script that I run that seems to fix this, mostly.
EXEC sp_resetstatus 'PROBLEM_DB_NAME'
GO
ALTER DATABASE PROBLEM_DB_NAME SET EMERGENCY
DBCC checkdb('PROBLEM_DB_NAME')
ALTER DATABASE PROBLEM_DB_NAME SET SINGLE_USER WITH ROLLBACK IMMEDIATE
DBCC CheckDB ('PROBLEM_DB_NAME', REPAIR_ALLOW_DATA_LOSS)
ALTER DATABASE PROBLEM_DB_NAME SET MULTI_USER
GO
No, I’m not entirely sure of the logic of how it works, and I’m pretty sure I can here DB Admins across the world screaming, but for my dev systems that I can afford to trash, it seems adequate.
Anyway, on this occasion it didn’t work, so I decided to simply delete the Search Service Application. I tried this through the UI – but it just seemed to hang. I tried again – and it seemed to hang. It wasn’t going away. I tried PowerShell – which took me a while as I’m still a fan of STSADM – and that didn’t work.
In the end I found the solution – on Donal Conlon’s blog – use STSADM -o deleteconfigurationobject
Yes, there’s a certain irony in that.
Last week I was working on a customer’s Dev system and when we tried to set up search we received the error:
“The search service is not able to connect to the machine that hosts the administration component”
Interesting. And annoying. I tried removing and recreating the search application service – and we got the same error. Weirdly, it had been working previously. Continue reading
I had two of my colleagues come to me with the same complaint – that the Basic Search Center site template in SharePoint 2010 doesn’t have any navigation to get ‘back’ to the rest of the site collection:
I pointed out to them that there are good reasons to consider having the Search Center separated from the rest of your content. I’d even suggest a separate Site Collection if using the Enterprise Search Center. (This uses the publishing features, and you might not want them turned on in your existing site collection).
However, my colleagues didn’t need all that, and really did just want a simple search center in the same site collection as their content. For example, a departmental site collection needed its own search center and search experience. But they’d really like users to be able to navigate back to the rest of the site collection.
So, I set forth to fix this dire state of affairs for them. Continue reading “Annoying Navigation in Search Centers”
I’d a really, really weird problem with a customer yesterday. We’d set up their SharePoint search. Indexing seemed to be working correctly, and when I logged in as an administrator, I was getting search results correctly. However, logged in as a normal – though very highly privileged – user my search results were missing! This was some thing of a surprise. It felt like security trimming, but the user was a Site Collection admin, and had Full Control throughout the entire main content web application. Also, we were indexing content off the network file share, and we knew he could access both the SharePoint Content.
However, when he ran a search, he didn’t get any search results. That sucked. I tried another user account – and had the same problem.
Eventually, I looked in the logs and found the following message:
AuthzInitializeContextFromSid failed with ERROR_ACCESS_DENIED. This error indicates that the account under which this process is executing may not have read access to the tokenGroupsGlobalAndUniversal attribute on the querying user’s Active Directory object. Query results which require non-Claims Windows authorization will not be returned to this querying user.
Continue reading “SharePoint Search – AuthzInitializeContextFromSid failed”
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