Custom column using MOSS Search Service

Question

We are using out of the box MOSS search web service to retrieve meta data of the documents. We are able to retrieve the document name, document link, author, last modified person, last modified dates of the documents in SharePoint. There are some custom columns added in some document libraries in SharePoint. We would like to retrieve the data in the custom columns.

Can any one please let us know if its possible to retrieve the data from custom columns using MOSS search web service? Is there a configuration change required to be made in SharePoint?

Thanks.

Answer 1

Yes, you must do some additional setup if you want your custom columns to be crawled (you're talking about /_vti_bin/Search.asmx right?).

You will need to set up Managed Properties through your Shared Services provider in Central Admin.

Central Admin -> [your SSP] -> Search Administration -> Metadata properties

Then you'll create a new Managed Property.

Things to note:

• A custom column won't show up to add as a managed property until an incremental crawl runs
• After creating a new managed property, a full crawl is required to populate it with data