Why only custom site columns which contain data will get managed & crawl properties

Question

i am facing a problem in understanding why some site columns got managed & crawl properties while the other do not. now when i check this further i found that only site columns which have data, will get managed properties created automatically when the crawl runs.

now i am facing this problem.

1. I have a site collection named Depts.
2. Inside this site collection i got 5 sub-sites; "HR", "Finance", "IT", "Accounting","customer service".

3. Inside each sub-site. it got its own site collection site columns. for example the HR sub-site have site columns such as "HR Area", "HR Problem Manager", etc..

4. now i wanted to add a Content Search WebPart. which oversee the 5 sub sites and show items which have the related "Problem Manager" = login user.

5. so i added a new Content Search webpart inside the site collection home page.
6. then i wanted to reference the related "<<Dept Name>> Problem Manager" site column.
7. the problem is that i have noted that only site columns which have data got a managed property under "central admin >> Manage services >> search service >> search schema". but i still want to referecne all the site columns inside my Content search web part. so when users add data the realted items shows inside the web part.

so now not sure how i can overcome these problems:-

1. how i can reference site columns which do not have data and thus do not have managed properties inside my "Content search web part"??

2. Now if manually creating the managed properties inside "central admin >> Manage services >> search service >> search schema" is the way to go . then how i can make sure that the crawl/managed property names are correct. because i got this example; i created a site column using the UI named "Software Development Risk/Issue owner" ,, where the site column got the following internal name "Software_x0020_Development_x0020_Risk_x002F_Issue_x0020_Owner", which is fine.. but its managed property name inside the search is "SoftwareDevelopmentOWSUSER" . so seems when building the managed property the white spaces are going to be removed from the site column name + there will be some character truncating... so how i can build my managed properties for the columns that do not have data in this case !!

Answer 1

When adding new columns in your SharePoint environment, and wanting to use them in SharePoint Search, they should be indexed first before you can use them.

To have new columns indexed, and thus have them available in search, you should:

• Make sure they have data in them
• Perform a full crawl

Columns that do not have any content in them will not be indexed if they do not exist in the search index yet. Of course, when they already exist, they will not be removed when the data is cleared.

Easiest approach that we come across, is usually:

• Create the column(s)
• Fill with dummy data
• Perform full crawl
• Remove dummy items

More information: https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn794220.aspx

Answer 2

Managed Property name doesn't create any affect! You can create a managed property named ABC for a column named XYZ, what matters is the fact that you do proper mapping of the crawl property to the managed property. You can then set that managed property to be

• Sortable
• Refinable

This is a blog which guides you to how to create a custom managed property

Ref

Answer 3

Just to add on top of the answers above. In your scenario the best possible solution for your Problem managers site column is to create manually or using Powershell one custom managed property let's say "ProblemManager" and map it to crawled properties of all the 5 site column for problem managers. Now this managed property will always contain the data for HR or IT or Finance problem manager depending on from which site the result was returned.

The advantage here is in your content search webpart query you just have to specify "ProblemManager:{User.Name}" to get the results from all the 5 sites where current user is the problem manager.

Answer 4

I am not sure do you refer to Sharepoint on premise or online, but to my knowledge Managed property are not created automatically. The process usually is

1. Create site column, create some content with this column (list item, document item)
2. Crawl the content, after crawl you should have crawled property available.
3. Then you create new managed property and map it to the crawled property.

This works well for couple of columns, but if you work on project then it may not be most efficient. You can create both crawled and managed properties using powershell, then you are not worried about column contains data:

New-SPEnterpriseSearchMetadataCrawledProperty (https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff608064.aspx)

New-SPEnterpriseSearchMetadataManagedProperty (https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff608089.aspx)

Here you have example how to bind them together in a script: http://blog.kuppens-switsers.net/sharepoint/creating-managed-crawled-properties-using-powershell/