Site Settings in SharePoint 2013: Part 5

Part 4

Welcome to the Search feature in SharePoint 2013. A wonderful feature is now available for all our important tasks. I know as a developer how many requirements we get for Search and since we don't have much freedom in other versions of SharePoint we land up making custom search boxes for the users.

But that need not be repeated; welcome to Search in SharePoint 2013.

I understand your excitement. Let's see what it has for developers.




Result Sources

Starting with the Result Sources we can use this feature to scope our search queries. As in the following screen shot we can see the following default search query that is provided by the external search service and SharePoint.



You can also have your own Query by a creating one of your own. Like as we can see:

• Add the Name
• Description
• Protocol as to from where do you want to query within SharePoint, or in another Remote Connection, Open Search or Exchange
• Add the type, whether it is SharePoint search results related to the indexing of SharePoint or it is People Search results where an index is set up for people.
• Then we have a Query Transform where you can build a query to index your search results.
• Finally we have Credential Information where the search can be set up as if it is allowed for certain people or certain groups.

Result Types

Next we have Result Types for how you want the results to display. As in the screen shot we can see we have Person, Microsoft Excel, Microsoft Power Point, special templates created to show the search results so if you search for a specific user then it will be shown in a specific people template and the others in a corresonding manner.



We almost have everything in our default result types but if you create a Custom content type then for that we need a different template. Don't worry, we can create one as in the following.



As stated, provide it a name and conditions as to how you want to query and then select a Template. A Template is nothing but a platform to show your results. You can easily create a template in the Look & Feel section in Site Settings to display your query results.

Query Rules

When it comes to Query Rules you can have one to create queries using default rules as shown below:



As we can see a Result Source from where you can select a source for your query, once you select any you have options to narrow down the query using user segments and categories.

Using this you can have your own rule set up for your own search queries.



Schema

Managed Properties

Let's come to the schema part. We need not search for our schema files since it is present in the site settings itself since we can see we can look at them under Managed Properties.



Crawled Properties

Similarly we have Crawled Properties that can be viewed from the Schema.



Categories

Here lastly we have Categories that can be viewed as to under what category our search schema falls.



Search Settings

Here we have search settings where you can enter a search URL if you want it to be searched from an external URL as well. Correspondingly way can identify a page to which the query results should go to and display the results and finally you can configure the search navigation. These are good and easy settings that were never available in our configurations in prior versions of SharePoint.



Searchable Columns

We would be aware by the term itself searchable columns that states it contains all the column names that are searchable and included as well can be included in the queries.



Search and Offline Availability

Then we have an exciting option for search and offline availability where we can index the site content as well as the aspx page content, we can also configure the offline client availability and finally we can render the site and configure it as per our requirements.



Configuration Import and Configuration Export

Then we have Configuration Import functionality where for every site you need not configure the preceding settings again. You can just export them from the site you want to use to and import it to your desired site, thereby saving much effort.



A real interesting feature isn't it?

It does not even save our efforts but also our time that developers like we already have less.

So keep learning.

Cheers.