Building search-driven apps in SharePoint Online can be a bit finicky. Actually, there’s a lot you should be aware of if your app is going to even leverage search at all but it’s all that more important if your data is getting updated a lot and you’re using search as your content retrieval mechanism. Here…
On-Going Management of Your Master Pages in SharePoint Online
Updated (12/4/2015): Correction around how default master pages are handled in the service. Thank you to @officedevpnp for calling it out. Another off-topic post but one that serves as an addendum to my previous post. Customers continue to wrestle with this and it is something the Office PnP team tends to address theoretically but…
SharePoint Search Architecture @ Ignite 2015
For those of you here at Microsoft Ignite, welcome! It's really exciting to be part of this massive event and with only a day under our belts, we've already seen some really cool announcements, not the least of which is the continued innovation on the Office Graph and Delve. On Friday afternoon, Dan Benson and…
Scripted update of SP2013 Search Center navigation links
Not wanting to have to hand edit my custom navigation links between lab, test, and production I wrote a little script to do it for me. It takes as input an xml file that defines the title and url of each link (I haven’t added support for external links yet but if needed, it would…
FAST Search Content SSA Architecture Demystified
I was recently working with a large enterprise customer trying to understand how they should design their FAST Search Content SSA architecture to handle their indexing throughput, indexing priority and high availability requirements for index freshness. Prior to this engagement, this element of the FAST Search architecture was largely a black box to me. From…
Content Processing Performance Scaling
SharePoint 2013 has added the Content Processing Service to handle preparing documents to be indexed by the search engine. One feature of the CPS is that it will adjust the number of processing flows depending on the number of physical cores present. From the 2013 boundaries page: If the number of physical cores on the…
Getting the current user’s alias
For a project I’m working on, I needed to know what the logged in user’s account alias was. Looking around I found examples that would make a ajax call out to the profile page and parse the results. This seemed like overkill for what I wanted and on a whim I decided to view-source on…
Anti-Virus settings and Pipeline Extensibility
If you’re using Pipeline Extensibility in Fast Search for SharePoint, you may know that files are written to a local directory for your program to work on before getting dumped back into the pipeline. This directory is: <Fast user’s home directory>\AppData\LocalLow Assuming you haven’t changed the location of the home directory, this would be: C:\Users\<your…
Quick Hits: Mapping a crawled property that contains TextChunks
This is quite an edge case, but someone may run into it again. Inside the FAST pipeline, there are two string types. Plain old strings and TextChunks. TextChunks are used to be able to efficiently handle large strings that may need to be modified. In my case today I had a copy of the body…
Quick Hits: Using a custom property with hit highlighting
So you have a managed property with SummaryType set to Dynamic and you want to use that in the FAST Search Center but your results show up with <c0> tags instead of highlighted terms? In the Core Results XSLT, replace the following: <xsl:when test=”hithighlightedsummary[. != ”]”> <xsl:call-template name=”HitHighlighting”> <xsl:with-param name=”hh” select=”hithighlightedsummary” /> </xsl:call-template> </xsl:when> with…