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…
FS4SP Branding Project
In this post I’ll describe a technique for branding a FAST Search for SharePoint Search Center. There are three places where branding changes are often made: The master page. The FAST Search Center is based on minimal.master and in this example I’ll just take a copy of that page and make a minor tweak to…
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…
Managing the SP Gatherer’s temp files
While the SharePoint Gatherer is processing files (Office documents, PDFs, etc), it will store them temporarily on local disk. By default this is in the Temp folder of the user running the OSearch14 service. It’ll look something like: C:\Users\SHAREP~1\AppData\Local\Temp\gthrsvc_OSearch14 And during a large crawl, this directory can at times get quite large. (as I found…
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…
Getting Refiner Counts Back in SharePoint 2013 Search
If you’ve taken a look at search in 2013 at all, you might have noticed the beloved counts are now gone from refiner counts. These were first introduced with Fast Search for SharePoint and represent what’s called deep refiners – that is- an accurate count of a refiner value from the entire corpus of data…
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…
Quick Hits: Dealing with managed properties in the search center XSLT
Even though you’ve named your managed property using mixed capitalization, doesn’t mean you can refer to it that way in the Search Core Results web part’s XSLT. You will need to lowercase them. See HitHighlightedProperties for an example in the default XSLT. For more, see the official low-down on the Search Core Results web part.
Smoke testing a FAST for SharePoint install
One of the things I like to do after first installing and configuring FAST, and before trying to connect the SharePoint SSA’s is to test the FAST install to make sure that basic indexing and search are working. None of this is rocket science but I got tired of typing it by hand each time…