In a video tutorial titled Working with metadata (Part 2), Agnes Molnar, subject matter expert on SharePoint search and a published author on the topic continues her presentation on Metadata considerations for the Search service of SharePoint Server 2013.
Crawled and managed properties care accessible from the “Search Schema” for the Search Service Application. The Search Service Application settings, including “Search Schema” are found in Central Administration for SharePoint 2013.
To create a new managed property, a SharePoint Administrator uses Central Administration to access the Search Service Application. From there a click of a mouse will set up the process of adding a new managed property. The first step is to provide a name for the managed property, and then a description for it. Then select the type of managed property (the choices are text, integer, decimal, date and time, yes/no, double precision float, and binary), which refers to the data type.
The managed property can be set to “searchable” by clicking the check box for the option. When a managed property is searchable, then users can ” . . . query against the content of the managed property.” (quoted from the screen shot of the SharePoint Server 2013 Central Administration dashboard included in our video tutorial).
Advanced setting options include “queryable” and “retrievable”. While the term “queryable” is nonsensical, the intention is to render the managed property “searchable”, but with an added requirement. “The managed property field name must be included in the query, itself, or included in the query programmatically.” When a managed property is set to “retrievable”, then the content of the managed property can be ” . . . returned in search results.”
Other advanced settings include “allow multiple values”, “refinable” and “sortable”. “Refinable” does not mean what it would otherwise mean, but means, instead, that the managed property can be used as a refiner for searches. On the other hand, “sortable” does mean what it appears to mean, that searches can be ordered by a sort of the content of the managed property.
An additional setting, “Safe for Anonymous” amounts to setting permissions for anonymous visitors to either work with the managed property or not.
We will continue our comments on this tutorial in the next post to this blog.
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