How can you tell if a document library column's metadata is being crawled?

Question

I am in the process of customizing the search results for a SharePoint 2010 site collection. Part of this site collection contains a document library I created to store some documents on one of the sites. Each one of the documents has been given a title via the document library interface. When this list is searched via the search center, documents return with either a metadata or heading title instead of the document library title. I have done some searching and found that it is possible to customize the search to use the document library title so long as the column's metadata is being crawled. I have two questions about this:

1. How can I tell that the document library's metadata is being crawled? I assumed that the data is already being crawled, but I have no real way to verify this.
2. When I am viewing the Managed Properties list via the Central Administration Search Service Application page, how do I know what the property names are mapped to on the site? I see some entries such as 'ows_Title', but these properties never have any items in the index actually using the property (even after checking 'Include values for this property in the search index' and running a Full Crawl).

Answer 1

First you have to check the core results fetched property list, and see if the managed metadata name is listed there. If not, add an entry. If the managed property is named "XYZ", then use this name when adding the fields to the list.

Also check that the crawled property is mapped to a managed property. Typically all list properties are prefixed with ows_. I´m not sure why this is, but I think it is some historical reason (anyone?).

In order to see what data is actually returned you can change your xslt to render the outputted xml, instead of transforming it to html. I actually wrote a blog post mentioning this the other day, and you can find the reference for this at MSDN.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0" xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform">
   <xsl:output method="xml" version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" indent="yes"/>
   <xsl:template match="/">
      <xmp><xsl:copy-of select="*"/></xmp>
   </xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>

Hope this will get you a bit on the way.