I recently had a need to read data from an xml configuration file that was stored within a SharePoint library. To make things easier I of course went to Google (or Bing) and checked to see if someone else had yet blogged this. Couldn’t find anything, so in order to help out someone else that may need to do the same at some point, I wrote up a quick little blog. Note: this will only work for on-premises versions of SharePoint. I’ll update with a SharePoint Online version in the future. I’ll also write up how to add and delete contents in a future post as well.
The other day I decided to start a power user best practice series. I started with site columns and now the next logical step is content types. I have found that many times experienced users don’t realise the importance of a properly setup content type. Because of this, they often are recreating the same data, having to redo the content types and in some cases blow them away and start over (both of which are a real pain if the CT is already being used). The intent of this post is to cover the best ways to create your content types.
Recently I was configuring search to access my SQL Server data via an external content type for a demo I was presenting. Once the content source was configured I ran the full crawl to populate the index with the data from my external source. After about a minute the crawl was marked complete. So naturally I am going to want to test it and make sure my data is pulling through. The external data is a basic asset database so I did a search for one of the manufacturers I knew was in there. Received the dreaded “Nothing here matches your search” message.
Well I know there is data in there so obviously something went wrong. I know what is wrong as I have done this before, but I want to go through some of the troubleshooting steps you can do to help determine the problem.