Return Documents based on a value in the Site Property Bag

Question

trying to work this out...I have Project Sites (Team Sites) that have a site column added to the Site Pages Library. You edit the properties of the Home Page and select a client name that the project relates to (Lookup to a Client list). There for The meta data entered on the home page will then be part of the sts_site/sts_web item which is indexed.

I need to develop a "Search Centre" whereby I can get all the Documents based on the Client Property of the sites. For example show me all the Project Documents for Client XXX, keeping in mind that Client XXX may have a number of different project sites.

Answer 1

This is the same problem we/most of the people are facing too. The issue here is, SharePoint Search uses index based on each entity and its metadata. Document is inside a SharePoint site and it only inherits its SharePoint site url but not all site metadata for each document. So there is no way Search will be picking up the site metadata to a document. The way you are expecting doesn't work OOB. If you want the solution then you need to do double querying by writing custom solution.

One search API query gets all SharePoint project sites belongs to the client code given. And then second Search API query to scope the documents to only those sites returned from first query. Let me know if you need help!

thanks

-Praveen.