Providing searchable metadata or 'tagging' a subsite

Question

I'm a newbie at SharePoint and I was wondering what was the best way to implement this:

I am creating subsites under a site collection using a web form and JS plus the REST api. Basically, what I need is to 'tag' each subsite with a set information or metadata like 'Contact Name', 'Type', etc. from values entered in my form.

What would be the best way to do this with the REST API? I need to list all the subsites later and display all these metadata identifying a particular subsite and be able to do a search on the metadata provided so I can get a filtered subsite list. Thanks!

Answer 1

Recommend you look at "Property Bags" that are indexed for search. Setting property bags is pretty simple with REST or CSOM, making them index-able is a bit trickier. You can set the property bag value to get crawled by search, then set the value to one of the Refinable Strings (e.g. RefinableStr00 in Search Schema Properties).

Haven't figured out how to do the indexing yet in O365, if you are on-prem there are plenty of tips for doing it server-side if you just google "Indexed Property Bags in SharePoint"

Answer 2

Property bags is not an incorrect answer, but I would either put the metadata on a list in the new site, or in a centrally available list.

Also, the new Office AppModel Samples has an example that changes the new site link to a custom page/app that can collect the data and update the list I've described.