Vikram Lakhotia Blog on Asp.Net, Dot Net, SQL, VIsual Studio, C# etc

Hi,

Of late I have been working in Sharepoint project which works extensively on searching of data. We have implemented our own custom search page and use Sharepoint object model for searching the data.

Yesterday I found a unique bug in Sharepoint. While search for data based on different specific columns (mapped in Metadata property mapping), the search never fetched result when I made a search on the Last modified by field. I had updated all of the documents multiple times and also crawled the records properly after updating the data. But this did not solved the problem.

I also tried to search the record from the out of box Advance search web part but with no luck. Search result for the Modified by field never showed up.

After googling a bit I found that this was a bug in Sharepoint. The problem is with the default metadata mapping ModifiedBy property.

Since the problem was only with the property and column mapping the problem can be solved with some steps to update the metadata mapping.

Below I have listed the steps for updating the ModifiedBy property to actually make it searchable. For able to perform the steps you should have basic idea on how to work with Sharepoint central administration and of course the permission to update in the central administration.

• Open the Sharepoint central administration – select the shared service you want to update from the list. Next click on search setting -> metadata property mapping to see the list of metadata property mapping.
• Find the property ModifiedBy (You might need to use the paging if additional property mapping have been made to find the field.) and click on Edit properties.
• Make sure the checkbox for “Include values from all crawled properties mapped” is selected.
• Remove all the current Mapping for the property by selecting the column name and clicking on the button Remove Mapping.
• Now click on Add mapping to add new required mapping. Clicking on Add Mapping will open a new pop up window.
• Add mapping for property Name OFFICE:8 which can be found in the category Office (Select from the drop down list).
• Also add the mapping for the field ows_Last_x0020_Modified(text) which will be found in the All categories.
• Also make sure the checkbox for “Allow this property to be used in scopes” is selected.

  After these changes are made and these changes to take affect you need to make a full crawl.
  

  
  

  After making the full crawl you will be able to find the search result for Modified By columns also.

  
  

  Vikram