Modifying Managed Properties

I’ve been working on a SharePoint 2007 Search project using BDC lately and one of the things that bit me was trying to make a change to a managed property.The change could be due to a misspelling of the property name or the mapping to the crawled property.You’ll find the Managed Properties in Central Administration under Shared Services Administration in your Shared Services Provider.Then go to Search Settings in the Search category.

Once you’re in the Search Settings, click on the Metadata Properties under Queries and Results in the navigation panel and you will land on the Metadata Property Mappings page.

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Here you will find the Managed Properties or the Crawled Properties view.Clicking on the Property Name in the Managed Properties view takes you to the Edit Managed Property screen where you can change the property name or the mapping to the crawled properties.What I discovered was after making a change to the property name and re-crawling the Content Source was that my property was not connecting with the Content Source.I was receiving the message “Property doesn’t exist or is used in a manner inconsistent with schema settings”.I was stumped because everything looked correct.Spelling was correct, mapping was correct and I was receiving a count on the number of items found with the property.

I finally managed (pardon the pun) to get the property to reconnect to the Content Source after I deleted the Managed Property and re-added it by using New Managed Property in the Managed Properties View.It’s not as much work to add the property back as it was to try to figure out what was wrong when it appeared that everything was set up properly for the property.You should also Reset All Crawled Content which is under the Crawling category in the Search Settings navigation panel.Then go to your Content Sources and Start a Full Crawl from the context menu of your Content Source.

I hope this advice saves you time and consternation. If everything looks good but doesn’t work, delete the Managed Property and start over.In this case, is your friend.