What does the Author property mean in the query service?

Question

I'm using the query search services of SharePoint and I'm not able to find in the MS documentation if the Author property matches the Created By, Modified By or both (or something else :)).

Any thoughts?

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

In SharePoint fields have display names and internal names. Created By or Modified By are display names of fields. Internal names are used when creating queries. Author is the internal name of Created By field and Editor is the internal name of Modified By field.

UPDATE

One way to check the internal name of a field from SharePoint UI is to go into List Settings and Click on the Column Name e.g. Modified By in Columns section. Observe the Url in the browser. It will be something like this:

http://aissp2013:111/_layouts/15/FldEditEx.aspx?List=%7B98089921%2D96C3%2D4B8C%2DB5D0%2D593360EFD1DA%7D&Field=Editor

At the end of the url is &Field=Editor which gives the internal name of the column.

However, as your question is regarding Search Service, this is how you should try to set up your CreatedBy and ModifiedBy managed properties in Search:

Go to Search service application in SharePoint Central administration site and click on Search Schema. Check the crawled properties of Author and Created By managed properties. You may need to add Office:4(Text) crawled property to Created By managed property. This is what I had to do long time before in SharePoint 2010. Similarly search the managed property EditorOWSUSER and notice the crawled property it is mapped to and then add that crawled property to ModifiedBy managed property.

Answer 2

Yep, Author is the Created By. Not sure why they named it the way they did.

Answer 3

Author is the internal name for a Created By field and the Managed Property named Author is mapped to the Crawled Property Author.

It means Search Crawler extracts Created By field values and Search Index stores them in Author Managed Property