Brief Introduction about Crawled and Managed Property in SharePoint 2013

By this time, all the SharePoint developers would have come to a conclusion that the entire SharePoint 2013 revolves around Search Schema. Many of us would have implemented the Custom Search Features, using JavaScript, C#, Custom Content Search WebParts etc.,

In all of these implementations, we may come across the terminology called “Crawled Property” and “Managed Property”.

In this article, let us try understand what exactly these terminologies are and SharePoint internally creates them.

As per Technet, the definition for Crawled Property is as follows.

A crawled property is content and metadata that is extracted from an item, such as a document or a URL, during a crawl.

In simple, a crawled property is nothing but a metadata for a SiteColumn. It may not be handled by the developers, but with the help of a Managed Property, we can extract the metadata from Crawled Property.

We cannot create the Crawled Property on our own. SharePoint will create the Crawled Property. We can create the Managed Property and Map the Managed Property to the Crawled Property.

So that these Managed Properties will be used by the search queries, webparts etc.,

For that, we should know, how exactly the crawled property names are framed, how SharePoint deals with that, so that we can make our own customizations accordingly. Again most of the information were already published in Technet and MSDN, I just wanted to make it handy and crispy.

For the creation of an automatically created crawled property name, the following apply:

a. Spaces are removed from the site column name.

b. For site columns of type Publishing HTML and Multiple line of text, the following prefix is added to the site column  name: ows_r_<four letter code>_

c. For site columns of type Managed Metadata, the following prefix is added to the site column  name: ows_taxId_

d. For all other site column types, the following prefix is added to the site column name: ows_q_<four letter code>_

For the creation of an automatically managed property name, the following apply:

a. Spaces are removed from the site column name

b. For site columns of type Managed Metadata, the following prefix is added to the site column name:owstaxId

c. For all other site column types, the following suffix is added to the site column name: OWS <four letter code>

Naming convention for the default site columns in the Products list

This exception applies to the six site columns that by default are associated with the Products list in the Product Catalog Site Collection, as shown in the table right below:

In SharePoint Server 2013, only site columns that contain values will automatically become managed properties when they are crawled. Regular columns will not automatically become managed properties when they are crawled.

The four letter code represents the site column type, not the managed property type. All automatically created managed properties are of type Text.

The types of the Managed Property are as follows.

Examples of automatically created crawled property names and managed property names for site columns without special characters

With this let us see, how to create Managed Properties and Use them on our code in the coming articles. In this article, thought of giving a high level introduction about the Managed Properties. Hence, most of the tables are taken from MSDN and Technet.

Happy Coding.

Sathish Nadarajan.