Customizing Search Series – Creating New Managed Properties

Welcome to the fourth article in the customizing search series. This article, although one of the shorter ones, continues the journey in customizing search and builds upon the previous articles in this series.

Now that the BDC source has been created and crawled, managed properties must be mapped to the crawled properties such that those columns may be used within the search results (XSLT). The steps in this article need to be repeated for each data element that is to be used within the search results. For scenario purposes, a Client URL is being provided by the BDC and this is the link we want to show in the search results (versus the standard BDC properties page).

From the Configure Search Settings page and select the “Metadata property mappings” link:

On the Metadata Property Mappings page click the New Managed Property button:

On the New Managed Property page, enter a name for the property, an applicable description, and select the type of information (most values will probably be the default of Text). After this has been entered, click on the Add Mapping button:

On the Crawled Property Mapping dialog, select the Business Data category. The list of available properties should appear. Find the appropriate property and select it. (If there are too many properties, enter a part of the name and use the Find button to narrow down the list).

Click OK.  Back on the New Managed Property screen, select the “Allow this property to be used in scopes” checkbox and then click OK.

Repeat for the remaining BDC data elements.

A full crawl will be needed on the BDC content source once the managed properties have been added.

What’s Next?

This was a short and sweet discussion but very necessary to continue. The next effort is to create the custom results page for use within the client search scope and therefore the next article will show the steps to successfully accomplish this task.