Stage 13: Plan to use refiners for faceted navigation in SharePoint Server - Part II

APPLIES TO: 2013 2016 2019 Subscription Edition SharePoint in Microsoft 365

Quick Overview

In Stage 12: Plan to use refiners for faceted navigation in SharePoint Server - Part I we identified the refiners we want to use for faceted navigation, and determined how we want the refiner values to be displayed.

In this article, you'll learn:

• About enabling a managed property to be a refinable managed property

• About refiner-enabled managed properties

• About defining the refiner-enabled managed properties to use in our Contoso scenario

Start stage 13

About enabling a managed property to be a refinable managed property

The first thing that you must do when you configure refiners for faceted navigation is to enable the managed properties that you want to use as refiners to be refinable managed properties.

Depending on your permission level, you can do this from two places:

There's a reason you can do this from two places: if you are working with catalog content (let's say you're a content manager), you are unlikely to have Search service application administration level rights, that is, you won't have access to Central Administration. But, you are very likely to have Site collection administrator permissions.

How to initiate a reindexing of the catalog explained how content managers can easily add content to the search index without the help of a Search service application administrator. So now that everyone's happy, we don't want to jeopardize this happiness by making content managers dependent on a Search service application administrator to enable refiners.

This article describes the procedure as it would be performed by a Site collection administrator (content manager). For information on how Search service application administrators can enable managed properties to be refinable managed properties, see Configure refiners and faceted navigation in SharePoint Server.

About refiner-enabled managed properties

At the beginning, we stated: ""The first thing that you must do when you configure refiners for faceted navigation is to enable the managed properties that you * want to use as refiners to be refinable managed properties." * Site collection administrators (content managers) can't actually do this because they don't have the required permission level. But, they have the permission level to map a crawled property to a refiner-enabled managed property.

This might seem a bit confusing. Let's look somewhat more into it.

Search service application administrators, who have access to Central Administration, can configure many things directly on a managed property. For example, the following screen shot shows how they can change the property named RedBrand to be refinable by selecting either Yes - active, or Yes - latent from the Refinable menu.

If we look at the same property from the perspective of a Site collection administrator, who is configuring the property on the site collection level, not only is the property name grayed out, but the Refinable menu is locked.

Luckily, there are many "empty" managed properties that by default are enabled as refiners. An "empty" managed property does not have a crawled property mapped to it. This means that Site collection administrators can map a crawled property to one of these refiner-enabled managed properties without having to enlist the help of a Search service application administrator.

The following table provides an overview of the managed properties that are enabled as refiners by default.

Stage 12: Plan to use refiners for faceted navigation in SharePoint Server - Part I listed the properties we want to use as refiners for the categories "Audio" and "Cameras." Now we have to add a fourth column to this table. For each refiner we want to use, we must define a refiner-enabled managed property. We'll then map the crawled property that represents the refiner to the appropriate refiner-enabled managed property.

About defining the refiner-enabled managed properties to use in our Contoso scenario

For refiners of type Text, we can use two of the RefinableString managed properties, as shown in the highlighted cells of the following table.

The numeric refiners are a bit trickier because we have to consider what type of numeric values we are dealing with, and how we want the refiner values to be listed. Let's start with the numeric refiner Price. In our Contoso scenario, the values for Price are whole numbers. A RefinableInt managed property can be used for whole numbers, and it displays refiner values in intervals. As shown in Stage 12: Plan to use refiners for faceted navigation in SharePoint Server - Part I, we want to display our Price refiner as intervals. So, for this refiner, we can use one of the RefinableInt managed properties. This is shown in the highlighted cell of the following table.

The remaining numeric refiners are a mix of whole numbers and decimal numbers. This could imply that we should use either RefinableInt or RefinableDecimal managed properties. But, because we want to display the refiner values in a list, we can't use either of them. Instead, we must use RefinableString managed properties. It might seem a bit counter-intuitive that we use managed properties that are meant for string values to display numeric refiner values, but this is the only way that we can display refiner values in a list.

So, our final list of refiner-enabled managed properties looks as follows:

Now that we've taken care of the planning, it's time do some actual configuring.

Next article in this series

Stage 14: Configure refiners for faceted navigation in SharePoint Server

See also

Other Resources

Plan refiners and faceted navigation