Dude! Where’s my FAST Search Center (February 2011 CU)?
Posted
Wednesday, April 13, 2011 8:59 AM
by
CoreyRoth
To date, I’ve written a few posts on issues that may occur when you are looking to create a search center. Sometimes the site template isn’t present or you receive an error. I recently encountered another issue with the FAST Search Center. The site template was present on the root site collection but it wasn’t present on another site collection. I decided to do some investigating to figure out what the cause was.
I decided to go take a look at the XML files for the site templates in 14\TEMPLATE\1033\XML. There I looked for the file that was most likely search related which happened to be webtempsrch.xml. I saw a listing for all of the usual site templates including one for the FAST Search Center. When I examined the configuration, I noticed that there was an attribute called VisibilityFeatureDependency as you can see in the snippet below.
<Template Name="SRCHCENTERFAST" ID="2000">
<Configuration ID="0" Title="FAST Search Center" Hidden="FALSE" ImageUrl="/_layouts/images/template_fast_srch_cen.png" Description="A site for delivering the FAST search experience. The welcome page includes a search box with two tabs: one for general searches, and another for searches for information about people. You can add and customize tabs to focus on other search scopes or result types." DisplayCategory="Enterprise" VisibilityFeatureDependency="5EAC763D-FBF5-4d6f-A76B-EDED7DD7B0A5" >
</Configuration>
</Template>
The next step was to determine what that feature was so I opened PowerShell and issued the following command.
Get-SPFeature –id 5EAC763D-FBF5-4d6f-A76B-EDED7DD7B0A5
It references a feature called SearchExtensions. It’s responsible for deploying the Visual Best Bet web part among other things. To enable the feature I just used the Enable-SPFeature command that I have talked about before using the URL to my site collection.
Enable-SPFeature –Id SearchExtensions –url http://sp2010/sites/deployment
Once I enable that feature, I go back to the site collection and use the New Site menu and sure enough there is my FAST Search Center.
I have my FAST search center back now and that is good, but I have never had an issue with this before. I decided to check another farm. In the above case, I was using February 2011 CU. I went back and checked my RTM build. I started by opening webtempsrch.xml again. It took me a second, but I realized that the feature GUID is different as shown below.
<Template Name="SRCHCENTERFAST" ID="2000">
<Configuration ID="0" Title="FAST Search Center" Hidden="FALSE" ImageUrl="/_layouts/images/template_fast_srch_cen.png" Description="A site for delivering the FAST search experience. The welcome page includes a search box with two tabs: one for general searches, and another for searches for information about people. You can add and customize tabs to focus on other search scopes or result types." DisplayCategory="Enterprise" VisibilityFeatureDependency="8581A8A7-CF16-4770-AC54-260265DDB0B2" >
</Configuration>
</Template>
That GUID listed in the RTM file (8581A8A7-CF16-4770-AC54-260265DDB0B2) is for the PremiumSite feature not SearchExtensions like I showed above. I took a look at the dates on the files and I noticed that webtempsrch.xml has a date of 1/19/2011 on the February 2011 CU build. The previous date was 1/9/2010. They changed it. I’m not sure why it changed, but I’m going to consider this a minor bug and will be reporting it. At least it’s easy to work around.