Is there any alternative for Managed Property 'Path' for SPO?

Question

I am working on SPO search API and identified there is an update pushed to 'First Release' tenant.

I am aware that SPO is implement smart content search, for example when user upload an Image, it read the content of image and generate metadata for it. But this update results in a problem I am facing now, i.e., when I search for all the documents from a specific library/ContentTypeId using Search, the managed property 'Path' is not resulting in Url to document, rather it returns Url to document Item (see below the difference b/w two url format and screenshot). This output behavior is not consistent for all documents. For example, an Image or a JS file returns the item url, while office documents like word/ppt etc or txt or PDF results in document url.

Item Url
https://[tenant].sharepoint.com/sites/[Library]/[site_coll]/Document/Forms/DispForm.aspx?ID=[num]

Document Url
https://[tenant].sharepoint.com/sites/[site_coll]/[Library]/Document/[folder(s)]/FileName.extension

So is there any workaround to get the entire document Url for any document type using SPO Managed Properties? I tried with multiple properties but unable to find a right solution, specifically when the document is present inside folders or document sets.

Answer 1

You can use the DefaultEncodingURL managed property as an alternative.

The full path of the document is stored in the EncodedAbsUrl internal column of a document library. The DefaultEncodingURL managed property is mapped to ows_EncodedAbsUrl crawled property which will give you the full path of the document.

Having said that, i think there could be an issue from Microsoft's end. So, would suggest that you open an issue in the SP Dev Docs list. They might take this up with MS engineering who might be able to figure it out in a better way.