Author / Simon Doy

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Posts by Simon Doy

I am an avid SharePoint enthusiast who works as an Independent SharePoint Consultant based in Leeds, United Kingdom. I am one of the organisers of the Yorkshire SharePoint User Group in the United Kingdom. I have been designing and building SharePoint solutions since 2006.
by Simon Doy

SharePoint 2013 Search: Keep getting Search Results even when there is no query made


Introduction

This is a quick one which caused me some problems on a project I have been working on.

So a quick introduction to SharePoint 2013 Search. SharePoint 2010 had a feature in search called “Search Scopes” this provided a way to select the content that you wanted to return results from based on certain criteria. For example if it had a certain Content Type or was found in a particular location.

In SharePoint 2013 Scopes have been replaced by Result Sources which provide the same feature plus some much more powerful selection criteria using tokens. For example you can retrieve the user performing the search and return content where the user is the author.

Problem

The problem is that I have a search page which has both the search query web part and a search results web part.

After setting up a custom Result Source query to refine the results down I would always get results displaying, even before a query had been submitted search.

The Result Source is configured by:-

  • Browsing to the Site Collection
  • Click on the Site Settings Icon
  • Choose Site Settings->Site Collection Administration->Search Result Sources
  • Create a New Result Source
  • Part of the setup is to create the Query Transform, this brings up the window below

Here is what was setup:-ThisQueryAlwaysReturnsResults

The query always returns search results. Normally results only appear when you click on the Test tab, providing the search query and click Test Query.

This is a problem as because the search will always execute as the user goes on the page and is just plain messy.

So I spent sometime trying to work out what was going on.

Solution

I have to say the solution took sometime and it was only after re-reading the following Technet article http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn186229.aspx#BKMK_How_does_query_transform_affect_query the section at the bottom “Narrowing search results by using a Query Transform” gave me the answer.

The key to all of this is that my query is not waiting for the search term before executing the search, it just always executes the search.

The example that the article provides is this:-

{?{searchTerms} ContentClass=urn:content-class:SPSPeople}

So that gave me the solution, the important thing is that if you want the query to wait for search terms to be filled in then wrap your query with curly brackets.

So the problem query goes from this:-

{searchTerms} (IsDocument=True AND (ContentTypeId:0x0101009CA89B0104F04692A106A1F88E847F7D*))

to this:-

{?{searchTerms} (IsDocument=True AND (ContentTypeId:0x0101009CA89B0104F04692A106A1F88E847F7D*))}

When I use the query above with the Query Transform this is the result, note the query returns no results.

ThisQueryWaitsforQueryBeforeReturnsResults

The query that I have will take any query and ensure that only search results that are documents that have a ContentTypeId which starts with a particular value.

I hope that helps someone!

by Simon Doy

PowerShell to Restart SharePoint Farm Windows Services


Introduction

One of the steps that I suggest when deploying upgrades to SharePoint solutions is before you do a Solution upgrade restart all the SharePoint related services.

So in a SharePoint 2010 Farm that would be:-

  • SharePoint Administration Service
  • SharePoint Timer Service
  • World Wide Web Publishing Service
  • IIS Admin Service
  • Web Analytics Service
    The reason is that certain processes (i.e. SharePoint Timer Service) can lock assemblies and cause solution deployment to fail.

However this step is a pain in the ass when you have a more than one server!

To help ease the pain here is a PowerShell script which will loop through all the servers on the farm (ignore the database servers) and restart the appropriate services.

The great thing about this script is it will also ensure that services that are required to be running are also running such as the SharePoint Administration Service!

The Script

param
(
	[Parameter(Mandatory=$false, HelpMessage='-ServiceNames Optional, provide a set of service names to restart.')]
	[Array]$ServiceNames=@("SharePoint 2010 Timer","SharePoint 2010 Administration","IIS Admin Service","World Wide Web Publishing Service")
);

Write-Host "Attempting to get SharePoint Servers in Farm" -ForegroundColor White;
$farm = Get-SPFarm;
$servers = $farm.Servers;
Write-Host "Found" $servers.Count "Servers in Farm (including database servers)" -ForegroundColor White;
foreach($server in $servers)
{
	if($server.Role -ne [Microsoft.SharePoint.Administration.SPServerRole]::Invalid)
	{
		Write-Host "Attempting to restart services on" $server.Name -ForegroundColor White;
		foreach($serviceName in $ServiceNames)
		{
			$serviceInstance = Get-Service -ComputerName $server.Name -Name $serviceName -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue;
			if($serviceInstance -ne $null)
			{
				Write-Host "Attempting to restart service" $serviceName ".." -ForegroundColor White -NoNewline;
				try
				{
					$restartServiceOutput="";
					Restart-Service -InputObject $serviceInstance;
					Write-Host " Done!" -ForegroundColor Green;
				}
				catch
				{
					Write-Host "Error Occured: " $_.Message;
				}
			}
		}
	}
}

Notice you can extend the Services that are restarted by adding/removing service names to the array parameter $ServiceNames.

Hope that helps.