Wednesday, October 16, 2019

Breaking SharePoint search since 2013 – a lesson into unintentional consequences of messing with out of the box managed properties

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I’ll start this post with a revised version of “Mikael’s managed property rule of three”, now called “Mikael’s managed property rule of four”:

  1. Never ever mess with the out of the box managed properties.
  2. Use automatic/implicit managed properties if possible.
  3. Map crawled properties (the plain ows_columnname ones) to the RefinableXXYY re-usable properties if possible. And do give them a unique alias for easier management and use.
  4. Create a custom managed property as last resort – which is only possible for Text and Yes/No columns.

Following these four rules will make your life easier, and help out troubleshooting search issues you might encounter.

Sometimes you think you know it all and then SharePoint search throws you a curveball. It’s been dormant all these years as it’s pretty much an edge case, but knowing this trick you can effectively break SharePoint search experiences quite magnificently :) Sounds fun right?

Note: You need access to the tenant search schema to break search experience globally, or employ this on your own site collections for mayhem and otherwise rendering yourself unpopular.