Office 365 (SharePoint 2013 Online) - Missing results in Search Results webpart

Scenario: While building a search based application in Office 365 (SharePoint 2013 Online) , I observed a behavior which I thought was quirky. A page on a publishing site had a Search Results web part and a Content by Search web part. While configuring them, I set them to have the same query and result source.

Expected result would’ve been the exact same result set and count. But for some reason, the Content By Search web part was returning all the pages as expected but the search results web part was only returning a subset of it. What was even quirkier was that the search preview on the search results web part would display all the results.

I initially thought that some pages might not have been published and hence search results web part would not display them, but that was not the case. I started to debug what was being returned to the browser. I looked at the objects that the search results returned and did not find anything there. Starting to analyze the data, I realized all the pages that were not showing up had some content that was similar, even though they were unique pages the content had a similar tone to it. I think in the earlier versions of the Search Result Web Parts, the user had an option to “Trim Duplicates” which is no longer present in the SharePoint 2013 Search Result Web Part’s properties.

Digging a bit deeper, I found a way to set the Trim Duplicates to false.

1. Export the Search Results Web Part from your page.

2. Open the .webpart file in your favorite editor.

3. Search for “Trim Duplicates”

4. Set the Trim Duplicates property to False.

5. Upload the web part.

6. Add the web part to your page.

SharePoint 2013 (Office 365) REST API - Supported and NOT Supported Columns

Not all types of column are available via REST, most annoyingly managed metadata columns are amongst this group of unsupported column types. Further, not all types of column will return data for an entry just by including them in the $select parameter, an example of which is Lookup (single or multi-value) columns.

Column	Support	Notes
Hyperlink or Picture	Supported
Single Line of Text	Supported
Multiple lines of text :: Plaintext	Supported
Multiple lines of text :: Richtext	Supported	Returns unencoded XHTML
Multiple lines of text :: Enhanced Richtext	Supported	Returns unencoded XHTML
Choice	Supported	Column is required in the $expand keyword
Counter	Supported
Integer	Supported
Number	Supported
Currency	Supported
Date	Supported	Returns an ISO 8601 date e.g. 2013-03-08T11:00:00
Yes/No	Supported	Returns true or false string literals
Person or Group	Supported	Column is required in the $expand keyword, append “Id” to the column name to get the user id (UserInformationList) value inline with each entry
Person or Group (Multi)	Supported	Column is required in the $expand keyword
Calculated	Supported
Computed	Supported
Managed Metadata	Not Supported
Managed Metadata (Multi)	Not Supported
Publishing HTML	Not Supported
Publishing Hyperlink	Not Supported
Publishing Image	Not Supported
Media Field	Not Supported
Summary Links	Not Supported
Publishing Image	Not Supported
Lookup	Supported	Column is required in the $expand keyword, append “Id” to the column name to get the lookup column target id value inline with each entry
Lookup (Multi)	Supported	Column is required in the $expand keyword

Change SharePoint 2013 Online (Office 365) to use your local time zone

If you upload your documents only to find that your Modified time stamp is hours off, your SharePoint Online site may be using the wrong Regional Setting for your Time Zone. This is generally set to Pacific Time (US and Canada) by default. Here are the steps to correct it:

1. In your team site, click Site Actions.

2. Click Site Settings.

3. On the Site Settings page, under the Site Administration section, click Regional settings.

4. In the Time Zone section set the Time zone drop-down list to the appropriate zone for you.

5. Click OK.

SharePoint Page Layout Error: Only Content controls are allowed directly in a content page that contains Content controls

The cause is improper case for the control tags in my page layout.  A few contorls used a lower case "c" instead of an uppercase "C" in the word content.  The page layout that had trouble had tags that looked like: instead of .  The specific offending tag is the one associated with the page title (<asp:Content ContentPlaceholderID="PlaceHolderPageTitle"runat="server">).  The solution was as simple as correcting the case of the tag name and all worked well.

"SharePoint 2013 Online Solution Design Document” template

http://tuannhaid.blogspot.co.uk/2011/01/sharepoint-solution-design-document.html

Cascading of Taxonomy Fields in SharePoint 2013 (Office 365)

Here are the useful links which help us in solving some taxonomy requirements.

First approach is like building a custom form either in list/library. Second approach is mostly tweaking the existing list/library to meet the requirement.
 
1) Cascaded Taxonomy Picker
http://dev.office.com/patterns-and-practices-detail/1893
 
2) Bind dynamically based on TermSet
http://www.sharepointnutsandbolts.com/2014/09/provisioning-managed-metadata-taxonomy-fields-three-cloud-friendly-ways.html

SharePoint 2013 Online (Office 365) - Powershell Scripts

Recently I came across an nice and useful stuff of powershell scripts which can be used to automate the creation of fields,content types,lists,libraries and few other things will little effort.

An Powershell MVP came up with an wonderful stuff. You can go through below link and start exploring the different powershell scripts which would make your development easy while creating solutions on SharePoint 2013 Online/On-Premise.

http://www.falchionconsulting.com/PowerShellViewer/Default.aspx

 

Callouts in SharePoint 2013 Online (Office 365)

Callouts in SharePoint 2013 Online (Office 365)

 

Microsoft has added new a  Framework for Creating Callouts (Notification or Hover Over Popups) in SharePoint 2013 Version. 

 

Callout.Js - This new JavaScript file added in the layouts folder at location C:\Program Files\Common Files\microsoft shared\Web Server Extensions\15\TEMPLATE\LAYOUTS. 
Callout.Js is a JavaScript file that contains methods for CalloutManager class.

CalloutManager - This is a new class to help Create CallOuts\Hover Popups in SharePoint 2013. CalloutManager allows to get or create an instance of the callout and manage its state. Similar to “Options” in Modal Dialog Framework users can set parameters using CalloutOptions for creating a new CalloutManager type Popup.

I found nice and detailed example in www.learningsharepoint.com

Here is the link : http://www.learningsharepoint.com/2012/12/30/the-new-hover-overpreviewcallout-popups-in-sharepoint-2013/