Managing Metadata

The Enterprise Search Administration namespace (Microsoft.Office.Server.Search.Administration) provides the ability to create code that manages properties used for Enterprise Search, for greater control over the Search Schema. Search administrators can use this namespace to do the following:

• Use some search properties as scopes (this gives the user greater control over which items are included in the search results).

• Easily customize the search options in the Advanced Search Web Part.

• Easily migrate Search Schema settings.

• Preconfigure Enterprise Search for custom metadata.

The new Enterprise Search Schema offers two types of properties: crawled and managed. These are discussed in the following sections.

Crawled Properties

Crawled properties are discovered by the search index service component when crawling content.

Note

To include a crawled property in the search experience, you must map it to a managed property. For details, see Mapping Crawled Properties to Managed Properties later in this topic.

A crawled property can be multivalued if the property has multiple values at the time it is crawled. The crawled properties are grouped by category, based on the protocol handler used.

Following are the default crawled property categories:

• HTML

• Lotus Notes

• PDF

• XML

• Office

• Exchange

• People

• Portal

• SharePoint

Managed Properties

Properties that are part of the Search user experience, which means they are available for search results, advanced search, and so on, are managed properties.

By default, you can retrieve all managed properties, and you can use all managed properties that are strings for full-text query or keyword query searches. You can declare a managed property as multivalued, which means that it will contain the values from all of the crawled properties mapped to it. If a managed property is mapped to a multivalued crawled property, the managed property can be queried with multiple values from the crawled property.

Mapping Crawled Properties to Managed Properties

To make a crawled property available for the Search experience—to make it available for Search queries and display it in Advanced Search and search results—you must map it to a managed property. You can map multiple crawled properties to a single managed property or map a single crawled property to multiple managed properties. If a managed property has multiple crawled properties mapped to it, and a document contains values for more than one of the crawled properties, the order in which the properties are mapped and their priority determine the managed property’s value.

Schema Object Model

You can find the classes for managing the Search Schema in the Microsoft.Office.Server.Search.Administration namespace, located in Microsoft.Office.Server.Search.dll. The following figure shows the Search Schema object model.

Search Schema object model

By using the Microsoft.Office.Server.Search.Administration.Category class, you can configure settings for crawled property categories, as described in Table 2.

Table 2. Settings for crawled property categories

Name	Description
Name	Category name.
DiscoverNewProperties	Indicates whether the crawler automatically discovers properties with every crawl. Default setting is true.
MapToContents	Indicates whether all string crawl properties are mapped to content. Default setting is true for the SharePoint category, false for all the other categories
AllowInFullTextQuery	Indicates whether crawled properties can be used in a CONTAINS clause when mapped to a managed property, without being recrawled. Default setting is true for string properties in all categories, false for other property types.

By using the Microsoft.Office.Server.Search.Administration.ManagedProperty class, you can configure settings for managed properties, as described in Table 3.

Table 3. Managed property settings

Name	Description
EnabledForScoping	Indicates whether the managed property is available to use for a scope.
MappingDisallowed	Indicates whether a crawled property can be mapped to this managed property.
Retrievable	Indicates whether the property can be displayed, sorted, or used with operators.
HasMultipleValues	Indicates whether the managed property is multivalued.
FullTextQueriable	Indicates whether this managed property can be used in a CONTAINS or FREETEXT clause, so that the property is specified through a query.
NoWordBreaker	Indicates whether the values for this managed property go through a word breaker.
NameNormalized	Indicates whether the property value is the name normalized. Applies to only Active Directory domain controller properties. An example of name normalization is converting a user name string to the full name for that user.
Description	Description specified for the managed property.
ManagedType	Data type for the managed property.
Name	Name of the managed property.
RemoveDuplicates	Indicates whether the managed property receives multiple values, if there are duplicates.
Weight	Applies to relevance configuration.

See Also

Tasks

How to: Return the Search Context for the Search Service Provider
How to: Retrieve the Managed Properties for a Shared Services Provider
How to: Retrieve the Crawled Properties Mapped to a Managed Property
How to: Create a Managed Property
How to: Delete a Managed Property

Reference

Microsoft.Office.Server.Search.Administration.Schema
Microsoft.Office.Server.Search.Administration.ManagedProperty
Microsoft.Office.Server.Search.Administration.CrawledProperty
Microsoft.Office.Server.Search.Administration.Category

Concepts

Getting Started with the Enterprise Search Administration Object Model