Highlighted Content Web Part - Issues filtering items with Managed Properties

[atrain204]

Would someone please be able to explain why I can't get the "Highlighted Content" web part to accurately filter and display files based on the custom fields I've picked? 

Context:  I have a library of PowerPoint files sitting in my department's SharePoint site (we'll call it "Site A") that I want to share on our Sales department's SharePoint site ("Site B").   This setup will allow me to update the files regularly, while only giving the sales staff READ permissions.

In Site A's document library, I've added two custom fields:

• CourseStatus - a "Yes/No" field that controls whether or not a file can be viewed by the sales staff.
• CourseNames - a text field that includes the names of apps that each course covers (i.e.: SharePoint, Teams, Planner, etc.). 

Both fields have been indexed.

On Site B, I've created a page that is supposed to use the "highlighted contents" web part to display the PowerPoint files from Site A.  While displaying the files was easy enough, using the "Managed Properties" to filter based on those custom properties has not been.

Here are the problems I've come across when using the custom fields as filters:

1. "CourseStatusOWSBOOL" is set so only courses with a "Yes/1" value is displayed.  However, if I modify that value back to "No/0", that change is not reflected on this SharePoint page - even after over 24 hours
   
   
2. "M365AppNamesOWSTEXT" is used to filter courses by name.  However, this field doesn't seem to work as intended and I'm not sure what I'm doing wrong.   I originally tried this with a "Choice" column type but with the same or worse results.

I will note that if the "Highlighted Content" web part works as expected on Site A (where I did my initial tests).  So I suspect that I don't fully understand how the "Managed Properties" works and need to know if I'm barking up the wrong tree.

[#2 · Accepted solution]

Hi @atrain204 

I've found a recent article on the SharePoint Maven website - Crawled versus Managed Properties in SharePoint Online that I think might help you.

Upshot of things is that when you have created your custom column, that becomes a crawled property, but you need to map that to a managed property so that you can use with the Highlighted content web part.

[#3]

thanks! That article was just what I needed.

[#4]

Thank you Jenny, i have a new question : I created a hub with several associated sites. I want to filter certain content from all these sites (documents, pages, news) using highlighted content web part.
Where should i create the custom fields as filters and map theme ? in each site ? in Hub only ? or there is another way to do ?

[#5]

Hi @Lamis ZOLHOF 

I would recommend that you set up content types in the Content type gallery that you'll find in the Content Services part of SharePoint Admin centre.  

In the process of setting up your content types you'll create custom columns that can be used across all your SharePoint site collections.  

For more info see Microsoft Docs Create or customise a content type

The SharePoint Maven site also has a great article with pictures - How to make the Content Types available on all SharePoint Sites via the Content Type Gallery

I hope this helps.