How to fix "Properties Title specified by the shared catalog could not be found in search schema"

Question

I want to set up cross site publishing of a pages library as a catalog. I want to do this while using variations. Thus, I have a source publishing site collection with two variation labels. Each of the respective subsites contains a page library that I want to publish as a catalog each. The pages libraries contain sample article pages. Each article page has a managed metadata field that contains a term from the managed metadata service termstore. I then publish (and crawl) the two catalogs from the source site collection using the "Title" field as a catalog item url field.

On the target publishing site collection where I want to consume the catalog, I have also set up two identical variation labels. If I open the "manage catalog connections" settings of a variation site I can see both published catalogs. However, if I try to connect to the catalog corresponding to the same variation label, I run into the error "Properties Title specified by the shared catalog could not be found in search schema". I get the very same error when I try to set up the connection for the other one of the variations.

The search service application's search schema does in fact contain a crawled property "Title" mapped to a managed property "Title". Can someone tell me what is going wrong? How do I fix this error?

Answer 1

Importing cmp files seems to break cross-site publishing!

I suspected that the problem had something to do with variations, but after additional tests and research I found that the culprit was in the way the sample article pages were created: I created these pages and then exported the pages library as a .cmp file by using the Export-SPWeb command. After subsequently importing them into the target site with the corresponding Import-SPWeb command, everything seemed fine and the pages looked normal. However, cross-site publishing after importing the cmp file triggered this error. I have since abandoned this approach of importing cmp files and create the pages in another way which has solved the problem for me.