What is the best practice to create property in propertybag (+ indexed for search)

Question

I would like to create a new property to the propertybag. And it needs to be indexed by search. I try this but it is not working:

private void CreatePropertyBagItem(Web web, string key,  string value)
        {
            web.Context.Load(web, w => w.AllProperties);

            //Execute query
            web.Context.ExecuteQuery();

            //set property bag
            web.AddIndexedPropertyBagKey(key);
            web.AllProperties[key] = value;

            //Update and write back to web
            web.Update();
            web.Context.ExecuteQuery();
        }

When I remove the row with "AddIndexedPropertyBagKey" it creates successfully a new property in the propertybag, but it is not indexed.

ps. I try to do this in CSOM code.

Answer 1

There is no AddIndexedPropertyBagKey method in CSOM. Add your property as per normal (Web.AllProperties.FieldValues.Add()) and then add it to the base64 encoded property vti_indexedpropertykeys.

Vesa Juvonen has methods here.

Answer 2

Based on the your comments and my investigation, it looks like there is some issue with the PnP code. Use it as below:

public void UpdateMetadata(ClientContext clientContext, string key)
{
    var props = clientContext.Web.AllProperties;
    clientContext.Load(props);
    clientContext.ExecuteQuery();

    // Confirm that property bag values are indexed by search
    List<string> keys = new List<string>();
    keys.Add(key);
    SetPropertyValue(clientContext, props, "vti_indexedpropertykeys", GetEncodedValueForSearchIndexProperty(keys));
}

public static string GetEncodedValueForSearchIndexProperty(List<string> keys)
{
    StringBuilder stringBuilder = new StringBuilder();
    foreach (string current in keys)
    {
        stringBuilder.Append(Convert.ToBase64String(Encoding.Unicode.GetBytes(current)));
        stringBuilder.Append('|');
    }
    return stringBuilder.ToString();
}

public void SetPropertyValue(ClientContext clientContext, PropertyValues props, string key, string value)
{
    props[key] = value;
    clientContext.Web.Update();
    clientContext.ExecuteQuery();
}