Forum Discussion
PnP - Site property bag items not indexed anymore by search
I apply a PnP template on an out of the box classic team site. Within this template I use the property bag element in my xml in order to add items to the property bag. Each property bag item has the attribute indexed="true" on it. The new property bag items are not picked up by the search crawler anymore. No crawled properties are created for the property bag items and so I am not able to map it to a managed property. In the past I used the same technique on an other template. When I use the same key for a property in that template in the other template, it is not picked up by search. The crawled property of this item is already in the index. When mapping it to a refinablestring managed property, no values come through. I waited for days now, nothing there. I tried re-indexing the site, etc. but no luck.
This morning I got a ticket from another client with the same issue. Same technique is used there.
Anyone with the same issue or does anybody know if something changed on this part?
Vesa Juvonen: any ideas?
Created a premier call for this issue at Microsoft. Got the following answer back:
I just had a quick chat with our Product team. The information I heard was not favorable at all.
As per the conversation they said Search is not indexing site property bag anymore. The change have been introduced recently.
So if you have any solutions using this technique, it won't work anymore!
Thank you for this important information! I guess it is valid for SharePoint Online? Or did I miss something in the update-notes for on Prem?
This just can't be true...I can't imagine they'd introduce a breaking change like this without further notice. This would impact so many customers...
But I have noticed a similar issue these days. In the end it turned out the issue only occures if you change permissons on the pages library or directly on the homepage of your site. In my case we had set read only permissions on the homepage so users could not modify the page.
Any chance this could be the same issue with your site?
After we changed that, everything worked perfectly again. Strange thing is...it only happend on some sites, but after the change it never happened again so far.
I still think it is a bug, but I have learned, working around issues is a lot easier and faster than waiting for MS to fix them...
Hi Robert, any update from MS on this? Were you ever able to get this working reliably?
I'm creating a template from a modern team site, enabling script, updating the property bag (on the web), and then disabling script. I can see my property bag value, and I can see that it's been added to the vti_indexedpropertykeys, but it never shows up as a crawled property.
Hi Cameron,
I have been though long conversations with MS premier support. I got no clear answer, but as stated before when inheriting permissions for the start page the property bag items were picked up by search. At some test sites at our client at some point it was nog working and the other day it was working again. So support stated it was not reproducible anymore and therefore the case was closed. My client didn't have problems anymore after that.
I have to state that this was for classic sites. I am not really sure if Search will pick property bag items up on modern sites at all. By default scripts are disabled, so I could imagine that modern sites are skipped on this part. If you have anymore information if modern sites do support this, please let me know!
Thanks Robert, I appreciate the response. I've got the question posted up to a couple other boards. I'll come back update this thread when I find out more.
I've got my suspicions that it's somehow related to the modern site template as well. We haven't changed any of the permissions on the start page in our case so I'm not sure where to go from here.
