Defining custom intervals for search refiners in SharePoint 2013

Refiners are a good way to narrow down your results, and often you may find that you are refining on ranges of data. A typical example from e-commerce is to limit on price ranges, where you may range from:

• 0-50
• 50-100
• 100-500
• 500-above

Out of the box SharePoint will divide the results into four box, with intervals calculated by an internal distribution formula. If we look at the file size refiner in SharePoint 2013 it will show something like this by default:

Limiting search results in SharePoint 2013 (aka scopes in 2010)

A typical scenario in SharePoint is to limit the results on a search page to specific content. In SharePoint 2010 this was achieved by creating Search Scopes, and then adding include and exclude rules to the scope. Then you could configure the Core Results Web Part to display results from that scope only.

SharePoint 2013 however introduces the concept of Result Sources instead of scopes. As a sample I will limit results to show items from one particular site.

You can create Result Sources on three different levels: Search Service Application, Site collection and Site. This means you can define Result Sources in a very granular way, depending on where you want to use them. But bear in mind that having configurations spread all across your sites increases complexity of maintenance. In this sample I will create my Result Source at the SSA level.

Error while running the FAST for SharePoint post configuration

During a customer installation the other day my project colleagues encountered a weird issue when configuring up a FAST server. (This was after we got all policy issues resolved due to server hardening – which took some time as well).

When running the configuration wizard they got an unexpected error, and the configuration didn’t finish.
Time to hit the installer log…. The error they got was hidden a bit down the load and was coming from the “ULS Common Core Components” which is installed during configuration.

20.10.2011 14:42:39 Verbose InstallAction - Installing ULSCommonCore services
20.10.2011 14:42:39 Verbose Executing ULSCommonCore installer msiexec /i "C:\FASTSearch\\installer\files\ulscommoncore.msi" /quiet /norestart INSTALLLEVEL=100 - 
20.10.2011 14:42:39 Verbose Utility.Execute - Starting process msiexec with working directory - , write output - False, file - , user - 
20.10.2011 14:42:41 Warning Utility.Execute - Return code for binary msiexec is not 0. This may indicate that binary didn't execute successfully
20.10.2011 14:42:41 Verbose Utility.Execute - Finished executing msiexec
20.10.2011 14:42:41 Error InstallULSCommonCore - An error occurred while executing binary msiexec. Return code is not 0.
20.10.2011 14:42:41 Error Utility.WriteException - Exception -  : Exception - System.Management.Automation.RuntimeException: Error executing ULSCommonCore installer.

Upon my suggestion they kicked off the ULS installer manually and got the following pop-up which gave information for further internet searches.



The error is caused by the registry size being too small and has to be increased. Not too obvious from neither the install log nor the pop-up.

Thanks to the below post for giving the resolution on how to increase it :) http://www.geosoft.com/support/knowledge-base/errormessage/Error-An-error-occurred-during-the-installation-of-assembly-Microsoft-VC90-ATL.

How not to name a configuration setting

Recently while looking over some FAST for SharePoint labs one of the exercises had you edit a property called:

AllowNonCleanUpClaimsCacheForTestingOnly.

The production setting for this is “false”, which will make the system do cleanup of a claims cache.

But reading the name and what it actually does is very hard due to using both the words “Allow”, “Non” and “TestingOnly”. You have a positive word, a negative word and a specific case where the property is valid, all in the same name.

The proper name for this should in my opinion be:

CleanUpClaimsCache

where the production value should be “true”. With a comment to explain why you would set this to false, e.g. in a test scenario.