Why isn't my metadata showing up as crawled properties?

Question

My understanding is that custom properties (=metadata) supplied for uploaded documents will become crawled properties, after a full index. Such has been done.

Examining the list of crawled properties (no mean feat) has not yet yielded a single crawled property relatable to my metadata. That the content has been indexed is proven by the Search results.

I want to map some of the metadata fields to managed properties, so that a search can return results within that scope.

First, can I assume that these crawled properties will appear within the "SharePoint" category in Crawled Properties?

Second, any ideas why the custom fields (=site columns) haven't morphed into crawled properties?

Answer 1

It's there now. I think it was the combination of needing documents in place and a full system crawl, before the crawled properties appeared in the properties store.

For others: such properties in SharePoint will appear with the prefix ows_. In fact, there can be a couple thousdand of these, most taken from the default SharePoint infrastructure. Several characters get a hexadecimal representation.

For example, there is this property taken randomly: Property Name: ows_x0031_x002e__x0020_On_x0020_av

That translates to "1: On av" in your text content (apparently short for "on average..."). You might have been looking for a property called "On average", where the context is a set of questions: "1. On average, how many..."

Converting these to managed properties was a simple matter of using the Managed Properties interface, and choosing them from among the crawled properties.