Wednesday, January 28, 2009

How can I search for a specific field within a list?

By Roi Kolbinger, SharePoint Technical Consultant, KWizCom Corporation

I've been asked more than a few times how to search for a specific field within a list so I decided to write this brief guide to walk you through the steps.

The first step is to create a new list with a field, for example a status field -Open/Close.
Now we want to find, for example, via the search box, the fields with the status "open"…

This part is a bit complicated but don't worry! It's not too hard…

Go to the Properties List.

Now we need to index our field so that the search application will recognize our files.

Go to Indexed columns



Now Search will recognize our field.
Next we'll go to:
Central administration -> Shared Services -> SharedServices (Your SSP name) -> search settings -> Content sources

Click on your source and then on "Start Incremental Crawl" (Full Crawl is not necessary).




Now go to:
Central administration -> Shared Services -> SharedServices (Your SSP name) -> search settings -> metadata property mappings

Click "New Managed Property".



Click "Add Mapping".





Find you field, select it and then press OK.

Next - fill in the property name, description and chose your type (Text, Integer ...).

Now go to the search box on your site



Write the name of the field you are searching for and ":" space and the substance of the field you are searching for.

That all!

Now your search application will always be able to find the field within your list.

Friday, January 9, 2009

Global Assembly Cache (GAC) folder suddenly appears empty? Technical problem solved!

A few days ago I was working with Visual Studio and suddenly I was "under attack", a technical problem so persistent that I had to find an immediate solution.

What happened? Suddenly, the Assembly folder (AKA "GAC folder" located at C:\WINDOWS\assembly) appeared empty. In addition, I could not deploy or run any of my web parts.

I restarted my virtual machine, hoping that the assembly folder contents would miraculously reappear after rebooting. That did the trick but it turned out to be a very temporary solution. As I continued working this problem intensified, occurring and greater and greater frequency.
Eventually it happened at intervals of about 10 minutes and it became impossible to continue.

Searching for a more long-lasting solution I came across a forum where many other developers complained about the same problem.

The suggestion I found there was to disable the Indexing Service (located in Start -> Programs -> Administrative Tools -> Services).

I tried this and thankfully it worked! All I had to do is to stop the service in the “services” screen.



Thing is – this service has a knack for “magically” restarting itself every now and then, so if you want to make sure you've gotten rid of it for good – I suggest also changing its start-up type to “Disabled”.



Since I implemented these changes on my computer everything has returned to normal and I've been able to work in Visual Studio freely and easily.

Hope this helps,
Shai Petel