SP2013: Managed property ArticleStartDateOWSDATE is Text type?

Question

One of our SP2013 site have publishing feature enabled. There is a site column "Article Date" with field name "ArticleStartDate".

By search "article" in managed properties list I found a field "ArticleStartDateOWSDATE". Out of my expectation its datatype is "text" not datetime. By default, it is mapped to crawled property "ows_q_DATE_ArticleStartDate".

I go ahead to setup search with it. I found the search is weird. In order to search out an item with Article date on 2013/08/24 I have to query with "ArticleStartDateOWSDate:2013/08/23" (no typo here, I have to input 1 day earlier)

Is it a known bug or some of my farm's special issue?

Answer 1

Most of the default managed properties in Search are based upon the text datatype.

We noticed the same problem when sorting the search results on 'ArticleStartDateOWSDATE'. The sort order was not correct due to the text datatype.

We simply solved it by creating a new managed property 'ArticleStartDateOWSDATE2' with the same settings but with the correct datatype.

Answer 2

In addition to the question asked in de comments of the answer. Here is how to convert a datetime to the correct datetime of the timezone of the SharePoint website.

SPRegionalSettings regionalSettings = SPContext.Current.RegionalSettings;
SPTimeZone timeZone = regionalSettings.TimeZone;  // Timezone of the current website
DateTime dateFromSearch= (DateTime) row[column];   // this date is in GMT/UTC timezone.
DateTime localTime = timeZone.UTCToLocalTime(dateFromSearch);