Lookup column in cross-site publishing

Question

We are developing a cross-site publishing solution -- we've got it working for basic stuff and I have a good understanding of how to make it work using this tutorial among others.

We are now trying to create site lookup column and have that information come through the search crawl. I'm able to get site columns with managed metadata and other types, but the lookup column doesn't seem to come through. The other columns automatically generate both crawled and managed properties, but the lookup column only gets a crawled property.

We tried manually creating a managed property for the lookup and mapping the crawled property to it. But that doesn't seem to work either. Could that require a full crawl before it starts to work?

Anybody have experience bringing a site lookup column through cross-site publishing?

Answer 1

If you create a new managed property you must run a full crawl before it becomes available.

You don't necessarily need search to do a traditional full crawl of all content though - you can force it to just do a full on your intended site. In the settings for the library where the look up column exists, under advanced settings there is button to Re-Index the list. This should force search to populate your new managed property without force a Full crawl of all your content.

If for some reason it's still not returning content, then I would initiate a full crawl against all your content.