User Profile multivalue field problem in search results

15. February 2010

A while ago I had this problem where the People search results displayed in the ‘People Search Core Results’ web part & "Search High Confidence Results" web parts didn't  show all the Skills from the User Profile. Only the last skill were returned from the search engine. I had the same behaviour when searching for people through the SharePoint search web service.

In the User Profile, as you can see below, multiple skills had been added to the SPS-Skills property. Notice that the last one is "Test Theory".



So when I did a serch for this user, I got the following XML output.

 

As you can see, only the last value was returned.

So what was causing this?

Well, after a lot of troubleshooting I found that this behaviour can occur if you edit the Skills Managed property using the Search Settings. When you edit this property or simply click the OK button on the Shared Services Administration: SSP > Search Administration > Managed Properties > Edit Managed Property > Edit Managed Property – Skills, the field "HasMultipleValues" within the SSP database table MSSManagedProperties, gets updated. By default the value for this field is 1, and it is updated to 0 even though this field does not map to any user editable properties on the SharePoint user interface.

Microsoft have confirmed this "issue", but do NOT consider it a bug. Yell
Update: Microsoft have changed their mind and now consider it a bug. No date for a QFE has been set.

Fortunately there's a way to reset HasMultipleValues to 1.

1. Create a custom dummy multivalue User Profile property and add it to the Skills Managed property.
2. Ensure that “Include values from all crawled properties mapped” is set.
3. Click OK.

 

Now the ‘HasMulitpleValues’ fiels is set to 1.

Do a full crawl. Executing the initial query again now returns all values from the Skills property.

 

 

MOSS 2007 ,

Comments

4/15/2010 2:15:07 PM #
I would like to thank you for the efforts you have made in writing this post. I am hoping the same best work from you in the future as well. In fact your creative writing abilities has inspired me to start my own BlogEngine blog now. Really the blogging is spreading its wings rapidly. Your write up is a fine example of it.
4/20/2010 5:08:48 PM #
@Rapidshare Search
Thanks, and welcome to the blogging community.
/Schau
5/11/2010 6:57:02 PM #
Pingback from blog.sharepointrx.com

Multi-valued Fields in Search not Returning All Values «                    Are you a user?
Andy Biegel
Andy Biegel
8/26/2010 12:35:30 PM #
Hi there,

You stated above that "Microsoft has changed their mind and now consider it a bug. No date for a QFE has been set.". Where were you able to get this information from? Thanks!
8/26/2010 3:27:49 PM #
Hi Andy,

I got that information from the Product Team through an Escalation Engineer. I haven't followed up, so I don't know the status of the QFE or if it was included in a CU.

/Schau
3/3/2011 9:13:38 PM #
Great post.
4/1/2011 8:59:11 PM #
Thanks for providing this information. I'm glad to read something about this multi value problem. I've noted down essential information that I know I can use!! Keep on sharing valuable post!!
10/8/2011 2:02:48 AM #
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