Managed Properties Not Populating with Data - Metadata Property Mappings

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Managed Properties Not Populating with Data - Metadata Property Mappings

I had an issue with managed properties and custom search results, where i was unable to properly search across custom fields as well as customising the search results.  The objective was to create a custom search engine that uses a scope configured to include results for items from a specific content type, where the content type has been deployed to multiple Site Collections.  The issue was that the managed property was not being populated with the expected data from all site collections.  Instances where the custom metadata fields was found on the primary collection worked fine, allowing the custom field to be included in the search and displayed in the results.

For all items on other site collection that use the same content type, the expected value was not included in the Managed Property.  When viewing search results, items from these site collections had no data for the value of the managed property when viewing the search results.

I found that the issue related to deploying the content type to each site collection.  After the deploy was complete, only the custom column from the primary site collection was accessible when mapping fields to the managed property.  The internal names for the equivelant columns on each of the other site collections were set in the format of an Id.  Redeploying the content types allowed the columns accross each site collection to be referrenced using the standard internal name instead of the column Id, or removing and re-adding the problem columns from the content types.  A temporary workaround was to map each instance of the columns from each site collection to the required managed property, with the option "Include values from a single crawled property based on the order specified" selected.

See Managed Properties Not Populating with Data - Metadata Property Mappings for details.