Crawler do not create custom crawled properties

Question

Hi, These days i have faced with very strange problem. I have development environment with MOSS 2007 SP 2 and WS 2008, i have search configured and everything works great. I have started to configuring staging environment (MOSS 2007 SP2 with June CU) and create new farm and new SSP. I have deployed my changes with package (wsp) and manually create site collections, sub webs, pages and so on. When fill crawl finishes, i see in Crawl log that all my pages have been successfully crawled and when i use some test tools to query search, my pages have been found. In crawl log there is few errors like http://mysite/sites/de/pages "The crawler could not communicate with the server. Check that the server is available and that the firewall access is configured correctly..", but all pages in this Page library were indexed.

The problem is that i use custom managed properties (mapped to custom crawled properties) in search queries, but crawler didn't create crawled properties for all my new site columns. For example for site column IsAccent the crawler didn't create cralwed property ows_isAccesnt. I'm sure that i have created pages for specific content type and all my crawl categories have checked "Automatically discover new properties when a crawl takes place ". In site settings -> Searchable columns i haven't got any column selected as Nocrowl. I tried to export my managed and crawled properties from dev environment to stage evironment but all my managed properties were empty, after that i recreated SSP...the result was the same...

I checked specific page with tools like Sharepoint Manager 2007 and U2U Caml Query Builder 2007 that content type is correct, and i can see values of my custom site collumns.... Using U2U Caml Query Builder 2007 agains some Page library in Result tab i can see ows_IsAccent (my site collumn is IsAccent) and others site columns, but i can't find them in Crawled properties.

Any idias?

Answer 1

Do your lists/libraries that use the new site columns have any items in them?

In order for your Site Columns to show up in the add mapping dialog for metadata properties, you have to have at least one item using that column.

Add an item and then run an incremental crawl.

Answer 2

Look into the definition of the site column, SharePoint tends to create cryptic internal names for the fields promoted to site columns.

You can use something like the Solution Generator (VSeWSS) or the SharePoint Manager 2007 (codeplex) to inspect the site columns and figure out their internal names.

For instance, here is a field promoted to a site column called Internal Description and the xml field definition (from schema.xml) of the form library:

    <Field ID="c8607d76_x002d_f648_x002d_47a8_x002d_a189_x002d_8fb8e7e8d18c" 
                Name="c8607d76_x002d_f648_x002d_47a8_x002d_a189_x002d_8fb8e7e8d18c" 
                DisplayName="Internal Description" 
                Required="FALSE" 
                SourceID="{3FF10E1F-FA95-417c-963D-518F272E2E43}"     
                StaticName="c8607d76_x002d_f648_x002d_47a8_x002d_a189_x002d_8fb8e7e8d18c" 
                ReadOnly="TRUE" Group="Microsoft Office InfoPath" 
                Node="/my:System/my:Internal_Description" Version="1"></Field>

That resulted in the crawled property with the name of: c8607d76_x002d_f648_x002d_47a8_x002d_a189_x002d_8fb8e7e8d18c