Return a rich text managed property in search results

Question

I am working with a custom list in Sharepoint 2010. The list has nine custom columns, some of which are rich text. I've mapped these custom columns to managed properties so that I can return them directly in search results.

When I look at the raw XML of the search results, the plain text managed properties are returned but the rich text columns are empty. If the search term is in the rich text column, the content is in the hithighlighted property but not with the rich text formatting.

Any ideas?

I am considering trying to convert the columns to Enhanced Rich Text so that the results are stored as HTML.

Ideally, I'll be sending these results into an Office Research pane through a webservice but I figured that I would try getting the results working on the site itself first (walking before running and all.)

Answer 1

Ultimately, the issue we were facing was two fold: One, the managed property wasn't configured properly -- the one referenced in the core search results webpart matching the managed property configured at the server level.

Two, the results, once returned, were plain text -- I believe this is to protect sites from malicious code which could be hiding in rich text search results. To overcome this limitation, we added an extra column for each rich text field. A custom event receiver (on add/update) encoded the rich text results using html entities -- storing the formatting as plain text. The results page xslt then re-interpreted the html entities as formatting.