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I apologize if this is a newbie kind of a question. Still trying to wrap my ahead around all the features available in SharePoint. If you have an alternate approach to this problem, I'd be happy to hear it.

I need to be able to search a list of "Project Write Ups" The "Find an Item" search box seems to have exactly the functionality I need (in that it applies a search to all the columns in a list) but I don't seem to be able to make it work in my situation.

I have two lists (shown below), connected by a lookup column. One "Project Write Up" is linked to multiple "Projects".

Project Write Ups
- ID (Primary Key)
- Write Up Version 1 (Multiline Text)
- Write Up Version 2 (Multiline Text)
- Write Up Version 3 (Multiline Text)

Projects
- Write Up ID (Foreign Key)
- Client Name
- Project Name
- Client Industry

Ultimately, what I would like would be something like a list view displaying the fields from the "Projects" list, but when you typed something into the "Find an Item" box, it would also search the related multi line text fields from "Project Write Ups" as well.

My original plan was that when I defined the look up field, I could bring the Multi Line text fields from "Project Write Ups" over into "Projects" as additional fields. However, I learned that this is not possible for Multi Line Text fields.

Another approach I tried was to create a linked data source, and then inserting it as a data view web part in a page, but I am not sure how to add the "Find an Item" box to it. Furthermore, I don't want to include the huge multiline text fields in my data view, so even if I could apply the filter, this may not be a good approach.

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As per my understanding you want to search data from that certain list. this can be accomplished by this

One of the handiest features that was added to a list or library is the inplace searchbox. The inplace searchbox allows you to quickly search for items or documents while staying in the list or library context (in previous versions you were redirected to a search page). When you have used this list or library searchbox, you may have experienced some problems like not been able to retrieve the items you needed or even retrieving no items at all. These problems can be related to columns from your list that are not configured as searchable. As an example created a contacts list with the following items:

enter image description here

The inplace searchbox allows you to quickly search for items or documents while staying in the list or library context (in previous versions you were redirected to a search page). When you have used this list or library searchbox, you may have experienced some problems like not been able to retrieve the items you needed or even retrieving no items at all. These problems can be related to columns from your list that are not configured as searchable. As an example I created a contacts list with the following items: Default contact list with items Default contact list with items

If I do a search on for a specific company like Contoso. I should expect to retrieve all the contacts linked to Contoso, but instead I am retrieving none.

enter image description here

Note: The searchbox does the following search query to retrieve the items: "path:path-to-the-list AND your-query-text".

In order to be able to search for content inside a column, that column needs to be searchable. A searchable column means that you can search based on a term without specifying the managed property name to find your information. Mikael Svenson wrote a great article about this topic: "What makes a SharePoint column searchable?". Note 1: Be sure that your items have been crawled and indexed. Note 2: Be sure to leave the Local SharePoint Results (result source) as the default.

In this example the company column needs to be checked to see if it is searchable. First you need to find the corresponding managed property inside the search schema. For the company field this is the OrgNames managed property. The OrgNames property is configured as follows:

enter image description here

OrgNames is only configured as queryable and not searchable. Queryable means that you need to include the managed property name in order to search for the information you want. You could test this in your list by doing a query like this: ManagedPropertyName:QueryText. You can test this in the list by searching for OrgNames:contoso.

enter image description here

This search query returns the items with the company set to Contoso. Of course you cannot expect from your end users to always type the managed property name in front of the search query, so you best enable the managed property to be searchable.

Making the managed property searchable

If you are working on an on-premises environment, you can enable this on the managed property linked to your site column. You need to edit the managed property in order to get a Searchable checkbox (only available in the Search Service Application), enable this and store your change.

enter image description here

The managed property now has the following configuration: enter image description here

Important: when working on Office 365 you cannot enable the searchable checkbox directly in the corresponding managed property. In Office 365 you need to create a new managed property, link it with the crawled property of your column and make the managed property searchable.

enter image description here

Wait for a full crawl to happen or start one. Once it finished, you can go back to the list or library. Do your search query again without the managed property name. Right now you should retrieve the same items like in the previous query.

enter image description here

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  • Hi Suryakant, Thank you for your response. However, I don't believe it answers my question. I actually do not want to just search A CERTAIN list. I have TWO RELATED LISTS, List A and List B. List A has a one-to-many relationship with List B. I want to be able to search B, but have the search results take into account the content of multi line text fields that are in List A. The information you have provided seems to focus on searching a single list, and I don't believe it explains how to do this for two related lists.
    – Ben Bray
    Commented Apr 17, 2017 at 15:20
  • Thanks for explaining your requirement. I will check and will update you at the earliest. Commented Apr 18, 2017 at 5:17
  • If you use Articles from other ppl, it doesn't hurt to at least reference the source where you got that from ;) eliostruyf.com/…
    – Leviani
    Commented Apr 7, 2020 at 16:18

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