Working with Managed Properties in Enterprise Search
Posted
Wednesday, September 19, 2007 2:48 PM
by
C-Dog's .NET Tip of the Day
I have been doing a lot of work with Enterprise Search again lately and in my testing process, I thought I would share some helpful information on the process. Today, I am working with managed properties. Managed Properties are properties in Enterprise Search that can be searched upon in custom queries or returned and displayed with the CoreResultsWebPart. A lot of this is document ok, but I thought it was worth reiterating.
If your source is the BDC, the thing I will reiterate again is to start small. Don't import the entire table at first just import the first small subset of rows. This is because as you are trying to get search to pick up your propeties, it is a lot easier to do it with small crawls. After your first successful crawl, Enterprise Search will list all of the columns its crawled as Crawled Properties. By default, anything that is a text field is searchable by doing a default search from a typical search. However, you may want to do a search and only search across certain properties instead of everything. To make this happen, you create Managed Properties. You simply create one and map it to the crawled properties of the entities you want to search. For example, if you want to search by state, you can create a property of that name and map it to the corresponding state crawled properties of all your entities.
After you set up a Managed Property, you must do another full crawl. If you don't, you will never be able to do queries based on the new managed properties you created. After that, you can start working on an advanced search page to seach these properties or you can query on them using the keyword syntax like below.
ManagedProperty:"MyKeyword"
For example, if I wanted to search for everything that had the state of texas, I would do the following.
State:"Texas"
You can also combine multiple keyword queries. Again this is all in the help, but this is how I test and make sure my managed properties are working.
State:"Texas" LastName:"Smith"
Hopefully, this will aid you the next time you are setting up Enterprise Search.
Read the complete post at http://www.dotnettipoftheday.com/blog.aspx?id=386