Various MOSS Enterprise Search Stuff – Part I

Recently I have been working on a large Content Management solution that required 300+ custom Managed/Metadata Properties in MOSS Search and had requirements to allow user to search on all of the Metadata Properties. MOSS Search Index was also used to run a number of reports such as “What Asset (Image, Video, Document etc) is used on what page?”

While working with MOSS Search I came across a number of things that I think are worth sharing.

Programmatically setting up Shared Scope

APIs to work with MOSS Search related Administration tasks such as creating Scopes, Managed Properties etc are very straight forward and well documented under Getting Started with the Enterprise Search Administration Object Model

But if you want to set up a shared scope, then it’s not very obvious from API how to do it. ScopeCollection.Create method as shown below takes owningSiteUrl as a parameter and to set up a shared scope just pass in null for owningSiteUrl and the scope will be created as a Shared Scope!

public Scope Create (
    string name,
    string description,
    Uri owningSiteUrl,
    bool displayInAdminUI,
    string alternateResultsPage,
    ScopeCompilationType compilationType
)

Programmatically setting up “Include values from a single crawled property based on order specified”

Programmatically setting up mappings to crawled properties is straight forward, if you want to add multiple crawled properties and include value only from a single crawled property based on the order than from the UI, you can simply check the radio button next “Include values from a single crawled property based on order specified”.

To do it programmatically add multiple Crawled properties to MappingCollection and then set ManagedProperty.RespectPriority property to true, here is some code (pseudo code really!) to add multiple crawled property mappings

                Schema propertiesSchema = new Schema(SearchContext.Current);
                ManagedPropertyCollection managedProperties = propertiesSchema.AllManagedProperties;
                ManagedProperty managedProperty = managedProperties["Test Property"];
                MappingCollection mappingCollection = managedProperty.GetMappings();

                //Create Crawled Property Mappings

                Mapping propMapping = new Mapping(new Guid("00130329-0000-0130-c000-000000131346"),
                                                 "ows_Modified_x0020_By",
                                                  "31",
                                                  managedProperty.PID);

                Mapping propMapping1 = new Mapping(new Guid("b725f130-47ef-101a-a5f1-02608c9eebac"),
                                                 "11",
                                                  "31",
                                                  managedProperty.PID);

                //Add in the order in which you want it to appear in the Admin UK
                mappingCollection.Add(propMapping);
                mappingCollection.Add(propMapping1);

                managedProperty.SetMappings(mappingCollection); // You have to do this for Mappings to work
                //Tell it to respect priority!
                managedProperty.RespectPriority = true;
                managedProperty.Update();

If you look at the Mapping object’s constructor below

public Mapping (
    Guid crawledPropset,
    string crawledPropertyName,
    int crawledPropertyVariantType,
    int managedPid
)

It takes a Guid (crawledPropset) which is the category of crawled property (SharePoint, People, etc) and also takes an int (crawledPropertyVariantType) which represents the DataType of crawled property, I find it annoying that list of possible values crawledPropset and crawledPropertyVariantType is not very handy so here are the possible values

Some Possible Values of crawledPropertyVariantType

Data Type	crawledPropertyVariantType
string	31
bool	11
integer	20
datetime	64
Something to do with Custom field	4127

*Please note that above values are what I have encountered till now *

Commonly Used crawledPropset

Category	crawledPropset
Sharepoint	00130329-0000-0130-c000-000000131346
Basic	0b63e343-9ccc-11d0-bcdb-00805fccce04
Mail	aa568eec-e0e5-11cf-8fda-00aa00a14f93
Office	f29f85e0-4ff9-1068-ab91-08002b27b3d9
People	00110329-0000-0110-c000-000000111146