SharePoint Search Refinement Panel

Hi Guys,

You may like to learn more about search refinement panel and how to use it.

Scenario:

Think that your client have several departments and each department having seperate documents to be use. Each department is a site collection and these specific documents residing in a document library called "Department Docs". So client asking for search refinement to implement.

My steps will be like below:

1.Create a Site column for holding departments, type : choices
2.Check the Document library residing in side the department site collection
3.Add the column to the default view of the document library
4.Add several documents to the library
5.Do a incremental crawl to the content source, through Central Admin-> Application Management -> Search Application-> Content Source
6.Wait till crawl completes
7.Create Managed Meta Data property
8.Do a full crawl
9.Create a Enterprise Search Centre page
10.Modify the page and Edit Refinement Panel webpart
11. Modify below category markup and save the webpart

<Category Title="Departments" Description="Departments docs" Type="Microsoft.Office.Server.Search.WebControls.ManagedPropertyFilterGenerator" MetadataThreshold="0" NumberOfFiltersToDisplay="3" MaxNumberOfFilters="20" ShowMoreLink="True" MappedProperty="Departments" MoreLinkText="show more" LessLinkText="show fewer" />


Note:
Title: appear in the refinement panel
MetadataThreshhold : if your department column having metadata this is the minimum value to use when displaying the results
MappedProperty : This is the Field name you have used to create the managed metadata.
12.Checkin the page
13.Run a search...There you can find the refinement values you have just configured.

I'll update this post with more screens, while time permits

Happy coding,

Buddike