Managed Properties Not Populating with Data – Metadata Property Mappings

I had an issue with managed properties and custom search results, where i was unable to properly search across custom fields as well as customising the search results.  The objective was to create a custom search engine that uses a scope configured to include results for items from a specific content type, where the content type has been deployed to multiple Site Collections.  The issue was that the managed property was not being populated with the expected data from all site collections.  Instances where the custom metadata fields was found on the primary collection worked fine, allowing the custom field to be included in the search and displayed in the results.

For all items on other site collection that use the same content type, the expected value was not included in the Managed Property.  When viewing search results, items from these site collections had no data for the value of the managed property when viewing the search results.

I found that the issue related to deploying the content type to each site collection.  After the deploy was complete, only the custom column from the primary site collection was accessible when mapping fields to the managed property.  The internal names for the equivelant columns on each of the other site collections were set in the format of an Id.  Redeploying the content types allowed the columns accross each site collection to be referrenced using the standard internal name instead of the column Id, or removing and re-adding the problem columns from the content types.  A temporary workaround was to map each instance of the columns from each site collection to the required managed property, with the option “Include values from a single crawled property based on the order specified” selected.

See Managed Properties Not Populating with Data – Metadata Property Mappings for details.

Web Part Connection Issues

I was having some trouble configuring Web Part connections between multiple web parts on a single page. The following article was able to assist, as there are a number of custom (third party) Web Parts on the page that being used in the connections to collect and pass parameters or filter values to Web Parts.

The issue occurred if the page was saved using SharePoint Designer. When the page is saved using SharePoint Designer after configuring a Web Part Connection, all Web Parts with previously configured connections disappear off the page. when in design mode, the Web Parts are still on the page, but are not visible when viewing the shared view of the page.

See Web Part Connection Issues for details.

Issue Deploying Solution After adding to Solution Store – SharePoint (MOSS 2007)

Deployment Status remains as “None” after deploying a solution, even thought result of the last operation states: “The solution was successfully deployed”.

The following article explains how to deploy the solution manually on the frontend server of the SharePoint Farm:
Issue Deploying Solution After adding to Solution Store – SharePoint (MOSS 2007)

SharePoint Metadata Not Saving After Editing Properties

Document metadata not saving when editing using the SharePoint web/browser interface. The issue seemed to relate to the version of Microsoft Office Client applications such as Word and Excel, where the metadata would revert to the default values after saving the document from SharePoint.

See Metadata Error: Metadata not saving on item in Document Library after editing Properties for details

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