Custom Refiners In SharePoint Online And On Premises

This article describes how to add custom refiner in SharePoint Online or on-premises Enterprise SharePoint Search. It really helps to enrich and drill down the required results.

OOTB Search result page with OOTB Refiners

Default Refiners or Filters

Refiners work with Manager Property only. All the above properties, such as - Result Type, Author & Modified Date are Managed Property - are defined in search schema.

Below are steps to add a more managed property in the Search Refiner WebPart.

Step 1

Edit the page and edit right-hand side refiner web part.

Refiner WebPart

Step 2

Edit the Webpart and click on the "Choose Refiners" options.

Choose Refiner

Step 3 Select the managed property from LHS list box and add to RHS like Region, Country, Site

By default, standard or naming convention of managed property is Site Column Name + OWS + Data Type. I have created the Region, Country, Site as site column with a single line of text.

Note

Site Column creates Managed Property and List column creates Crawl Property. Using Search Schema, Managed Property can be mapped with more than one Crawl Property. Managed Property can be used in Refiners or Filters.
 
Similarly, we can rename the display name, apply the template, sort the property etc.

Managed Properties

Step 4

To get the Managed Property - go to Site Setting -> Site Collection Administration -> Search Schema. 

Search Settings 

Step 5

Select Managed Property link and search for Site Column i.e. region as highlighted below. I got the managed property i.e. RegionOWSText and Edit the property and set Query, Search, Refine if not selected, as shown below.

Search Schema

Step 6

Search Result Page with Custom Managed Property

 Result Page