How to add Publishing Image Field in your Search results

Hi,

This has been a recurring problem in SharePoint: Although you add a publishingImage field to your layout and it gets indexed, the managed property mapped to this crawled property has no value.

This is related to two issues:

• Compound controls does not get indexed. Specifically only text is get indexed, and HTML is stripped out. So an image <img /> get an empty string, but summary links returns text.
• SharePoint does not understand PublishingImage field. It may index all img.src of a page, but no specific parsing.

There are several solutions to resolved this scenario, but all they seem too complex (ex.: create a second field and update it with the url with an event receiver). Finally we get a simple solution without changing the product ;)

1. Create a webcontrol that will read from the current item the field value and write in the pageadditionalhead placeholder a meta tag
2. Add the webcontrol to your page layout
3. Run an incremental crawl to get the property
4. Create a managed property that will be mapped to the crawled property named in uppercase as the name of the meta tag, in the Web category

A sample of the webcontrol code:

using System.Web.UI;

using System.Web.UI.WebControls;

using System.ComponentModel;

using Microsoft.SharePoint.Utilities;

using Microsoft.SharePoint;

using Microsoft.SharePoint.Publishing.Fields;



namespace Microsoft.Services.WebControls

{

    [DefaultProperty("Text"),

    ToolboxData("<{0}:IndexableImage runat=\"server\" />")]

    public class IndexableImage : WebControl

    {

        private static string getImageUrl(){

            ImageFieldValue imgField = null;



            if (SPContext.Current.ListItem["metaImage"] != null)

            {

                imgField = (ImageFieldValue)SPContext.Current.ListItem["metaImage"];



                if (imgField != null)

                {

                    return imgField.ImageUrl;

                }

            }



            return string.Empty;           

        }



        protected override void Render(HtmlTextWriter output)

        {

            output.Write("<meta");

            output.WriteAttribute("name", "metaImage");

            output.WriteAttribute("content", getImageUrl());

            output.Write("/>");

            output.WriteLine();

        }

    }

}

Namaste!