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Advanced Search not working when Adding New Metadata Property with Non-English Column Names

Posted on 20. Dec, 2009 by admin in Articles, Sharepoint

When using Advanced Search to search for items in a list using a specific property that use a Column name in Greek or any non standard ASCII characters.

after doing incremental crawl and adding the New Metadata Property with the Mapping to the Greek Column, Advanced Search is not working as needed and returns no result for Greek Columns but for English it works fine.

-          I tested the advanced search and found out that it is working when we use columns in English language

-          when using column in Greek Language, Advanced Search works fine for only DOC, xls, ppt.. files which are Office 2003 files while all the other files such as Office 2007, PDF,TXT… files doesn’t get returned by the advanced search.

-          I checked the Search IFilters for office 2007 files as per the KB http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=944433  and everything was fine

-          created a new column in Greek and found out that when adding mapping to the Metadata Property there is only the text value of the column and no OWS_FieldName value

-          tested on my virtual machine and found out that the missing OWS_ColumnName is the cause for the issue

-          I found out that the Column Name is converted to Standard ASCII characters and this is why when searching for the column name in Add Mapping we don’t find the OWS_ColumnName entry

-          Used this article to find out what my column characters are encoded to http://tlt.its.psu.edu/suggestions/international/bylanguage/greekchart.html

-          added the OWS_ColumnName with the Hex encoding characters for the Greek Column Name

-          Tested advanced search and it worked fine

-          This is by Design of the product since everything which is not the standard ASCII character will be encoded in the column name.

Tags: Add, Advanced Search, ASCII, characters, column, crawl, encod, featured, IFilters, incremental crawl, Mapping, Metadata, New, no result, non standard ASCII, Office 2003, Office 2007, OWS_, Property, Search, sharepoint 2007