PointBridge Blogs - Thomas DuPont

By: Thomas DuPont Posted: July 1, 2010 at 7:35 AM

To quickly and easily test FAST queries, you can use the Search Front End UI and its advanced options to create queries against your content without having to debug queries through code. This is a very useful feature, especially if you have worked on SharePoint Search projects where testing queries consisted of building your own application or using a third party tool.

You can execute simple text search and apply a search mode (All, Any or Exact Phrase):

Advanced options provided an easy way to query your content:

You can also directly try your FQL queries:

Get the results

If you want to investigate all the fields coming back from FAST, you can easily configure that in the advanced options by checking the 'Show All Fields' check box and you will be able to see all the fields and their respective values:

For even more details on your search results, check the 'Debug Mode' check box

and the ranklog field now shows a formula with which the rank value is being calculated:

You can also specifically search against fields in the 'Fielded Search':

FAST Query Language

By: Thomas DuPont Posted: July 1, 2010 at 7:34 AM

FQL stands for 'FAST Query Language' and it used to build very flexible and powerful queries of the index. Here is a simple FQL example in which the word 'Examen' is searched within the document field named 'passage':

passage:string("Examen")

AND/OR: in these examples, the 'and' / 'or' operators indicate that they are applied to the query terms 'Red' and 'Car':

passage:and("Red", "Car")

passage:or("Red", "Car")

In the previous examples, a single non-scope field was used in the field specification. You could also use FAST's composite field which consists of a set of fields:

<composite-field name="customcompositefield" >

<field-ref name="passage" level="1" >

<field-ref name="title" level="2" />

</composite-field>

Now FQL can be used to easily query a composite field using the field specification such as:

customcompositefield: and("Red", "Car")

NOT: this operator used to find results that don't match the operand:

passage:not("2009") <- only returns documents that do not match the operand '2009'

COUNT: this operator returns the number of times the operand is found.

passage:count("Car")

You could extend COUNT to something like:

passage:count("Car") > 10 <- shows documents in which 'car' appears more than 10 times.

Send To Connections in SharePoint 2010

By: Thomas DuPont Posted: March 29, 2010 at 10:17 AM

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Send To Connections in SharePoint 2010 offer much more flexibility and a great way to better managed documents. A user can move a document from one location to another, create a copy of a document and send it to another location, or move a document but leave a link of its new location in former location. Documents can be sent across site, site collection or even farms using the OfficialFile web service defined here:

In SharePoint 2007, you have to create a Record Center site in order to use the Record management functionality. Now, in SharePoint 2010, the record management functionality has been wrapped into a feature called 'Content Organizer' which provides a lot of flexibility. For example, if you want your site to be a document recipient, it is now possible by just enabling a site feature (versus creating a dedicated Record management site like we do in SharePoint 2007).

Creating a Send to Connection

Before you create a new Send to Connection, make sure the site you are planning to use as a target site has the content organizer feature enabled

If you don't enable that feature, you won't be able to create the send to connection.

Go to Central Administration in General Application Settings. Under the External Service Connections section, locate and click on 'Configure sent to connections':

New features are available in the connector in the SharePoint 2010. In addition to just move and document, you can now choose to copy document but also move a document and leave a Link in the current document library location that points to the new location of the document as show here:

Once your Send To Connection is created and you choose to set it manual use in document libraries, it should show as shown here in the item context menu in the 'Send To' category:

Document ID Service in SharePoint 2010

By: Thomas DuPont Posted: March 25, 2010 at 6:18 PM

The Document ID Service feature is a great addition to SharePoint 2010.

SharePoint 2007 lacks the ability to link to a document without using its path, which is a problem when a document is moved to a different document library, site collection or farm. A link could ultimately become a broken link as soon as the targeted document path is changed. The new Document ID feature in SharePoint 2010 now fixes this issue as it assigns a unique ID and associates a permanent URL to any new document added.

The Document ID service will find any document using its Document ID and the following two approaches. First approach, it will execute a search query and try find the document. If Search is unable to find the document, let's say that document has been moved but its new location or that a new document has been simply added and that the index hasn't picked it up yet, then the Document ID service will use its second approach. The second approach consists of using its own lookup logic using the List ID and List Item ID that are in the document's unique ID.

There is also a very useful Document ID web part that can be used to quickly retrieve a document:

Content Organizer in SharePoint 2010

By: Thomas DuPont Posted: January 4, 2010 at 3:53 PM

A great new feature in SharePoint 2010 is the content organizer. In SharePoint 2007, the only way to manage your documents was to use the Record Center Site template which didn't really provide flexibility. Now in SharePoint 2010, the routing engine and supporting settings are encapsulated in a feature that can be activated in any site.

Enable the feature 'Content Organizer' at the site level:

Once the feature activated, you will notice two new settings links appearing on the site settings page:

Send To Another Site

In the Content Organizer Settings page, you will notice an option that let you send an item to another site. By default that option is not selected and therefore only allows the routing to happen within a site.

When the 'Sending to Another Site' check box is not selected in the Content Organizer Settings page, your rule setting page in the target location section will show as shown here:

When you do check that 'Sending to Another Site' check box, you will see a drop down list that will contain all your 'Send To connections:

You can define and create your 'Send to' connections in Central Administration at :

Central Administration > General Application Settings > Configure Send To Connections

On the configure send to connections page, enter the url of your site and append the web service 'OfficialFile.asmx' :

Just keep in mind that the site your sending the item to must have the Content Organizer feature enabled as well.

Another interesting feature in the Content Organizer Settings page is the Folder Partitioning option.

With SharePoint 2010 you can automatically configure an item limit of the target location. Once the limit is reached, subfolders are created and used to store incoming items.

Content Types Filtering

You can now use Content Types and their metadata columns to define your rule:

Priority

You can also set a priority of your rules. When incoming items are going to be processed by the routing engine, rules with the highest priority are going to be processed first. A rule with priority of 5 will be processed before a rule of priority of 7 (which is lower). If all conditions in a rule are met, remaining rules are not processed and the item is automatically routed.

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