Originally published on 8/21/2005

Most users of SharePoint Portal Server rapidly become enamored with the ability to add new fields (containing meta data) to documents in the document library. All of the sudden it becomes possible to associate information to a file beyond the file name that we’ve been limited to since the beginning of the computing era. However, few users have the opportunity to understand how this meta data is used by SharePoint for searching. This leads to problems when users decide that it’s necessary to use SharePoint Portal Server Search to search on information contained in a field that they have added. In this article you’ll learn how SharePoint uses document library fields to create properties which are searchable and how to enable searching on those properties.

The Power of Properties

SharePoint Portal Server’s search facility really works in two different ways. First, there’s the full text search. This searches across all of the text in every document that is in the index. This search is what most people think of when they think of SharePoint’s search capability.

Second, there is the property search. During the indexing process, the IFILTERs which extract the text out of the documents put property information into special property buckets which are kept separate in the index so they can be searched separately. This allows you to set properties in your Office documents such as department, project number, author, keywords, etc., and then you’ll have the ability to search on those fields individually. You can use the search engine in SharePoint to search for documents where the department is engineering and the project is 123. Where a full text document search for engineering and 123 may find hundreds of entries because the words engineering and the number sequence 123 appears in many documents, a search via properties may yield the 10 or so documents that are truly relevant to your search.

Properties are what most people believe that they are creating when they create a new field in a document library. That’s not actually true. The meta data fields in a document library don’t have anything to do with properties directly.

Office Does a Slight of Hand

However, during the edit process Office perform a little slight of hand. It takes the information you enter in the meta data fields for the document library and makes corresponding custom properties in the document. The net effect is that although you’ve only created fields in a document library, you’re documents now have custom properties.

These custom properties are picked up by the indexing process (more specifically the IFILTER for Office documents) and they are placed into the search index. You can then use those properties by making them available via the advanced search page in SharePoint.

However, this also means that non-Office documents don’t share the same relationship between fields in the document library and the properties of the document itself. So if you’re trying to develop a searching mechanism for documents like TIF documents or PDFs you’ll find that setting up a meta data field for those document libraries won’t allow you to search for those documents directly via their properties. You’ll still be able to organize the information

Setting up a test

Now that we understand the basic mechanisms of how SharePoint uses meta data and properties let’s demonstrate how it works. Here’s what you need to do to set up the demonstration.

1. Create a site. For instance, I used /Sites/Test.
2. Open the Shared Documents library by clicking on the Quick Nav Bar link to Shared Documents.
3. Click on the Modify Settings and Columns link in the left bar.
4. Click on the Add a new column link
5. Enter a name in the Column name box. You can select any name you would like, I used Rob, Try, and IntranetJournal as my field names.
6. Click the OK button.
7. Repeat steps 4-7 for any additional columns you want to create. I repeated the process two additional times to get my two additional fields in.
8. Click the Go Back to “Shared Documents” link to return to the Shared Documents Library.

Putting it to work

Now that you have a document library with custom fields, you can create a few new documents. Here’s what to do:

1. Click the New Document button on the task bar.
2. Enter some basic text in the document. (This text can be anything you would like.)
3. Click File-Save.
4. Give the document a name and click the Save button.
5. Enter the meta data into the fields which are displayed. You should consider entering different text than the text you used in the document.
6. Click the OK button.
7. Close Word.
8. Verify that the text that you entered is visible in the new fields on the document library.
9. Click the document you just created in the document library list and click OK to the warning dialog if necessary.
10. Click File-Properties. Notice that the meta data properties from the document library appears.
11. Click the File Properties button. The standard Word document properties dialog is displayed.
12. Click the Custom tab.
13. Note that the meta data that you entered for the document library also exists as a custom property of the document.
14. Click OK to close the properties dialog.
15. Close Word.

Now you have a document in SharePoint with properties so you can go setup the search for them.

Ensure that the Document is Indexed

Before you can search on your new property you have to first ensure that SharePoint has indexed the document. This is done from the Portal by following this procedure:

1. Open the SharePoint Portal
2. Click on Site Settings in the navigation bar on the top of the window.
3. In the Search Settings and Indexed Content section, click the Configure search and indexing link.
4. In the Content Indexes section, click on the Manage content indexes link.
5. Hover over the Non_Portal_Content link, drop down the menu via the arrow on the right, and click Start Full Update.
6. Wait for the Last Update Status for the Non_Portal_Content index to display the word Idle. The page will automatically refresh itself.

Set up the Properties for Search

We had to ensure that the document was indexed so that the new properties would appear. During the indexing process the IFILTER which processes Word files automatically created new entries in the SharePoint Search Property list for the properties which were discovered in the document we just uploaded. The final set of steps are to enable the properties on the advanced properties page. To do this follow these steps:

1. Open the SharePoint Portal.
2. Click on Site Settings in the navigation bar on the top of the window.
3. In the Search Settings and Indexed Content section, click the Manage properties from crawled documents.
4. Click the plus sign to the left of urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office.
5. Scroll down to one of the names of the fields you added to the list above (and verified became a property). Click the property from the list.
6. Check the Include this property in Advanced Search options checkbox.
7. Click the OK button.
8. Click the Return to Portal link at the top of the page.
9. From the Start Menu select Run and then type in IISRESET and press return.
10. Click the magnifying glass to the left of the drop down list containing the text All Sources.
11. Expand the drop down underneath the Search by properties: label to see that your new property is available to be searched.

You can now search SharePoint Portal Server for just the field you added in the list . Of course, as you have seen, you’re actually searching the property that was added to the Word document, but the effect is the same since Office is managing the transition to the document properties.