Microsoft Enterprise Search Blog : WebService

Add Virtual Earth Interactive Maps to your Search Server Site

enterprisesearch — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 00:40:24 GMT

Are you trying to think of ways to make your Search Server site more interactive and graphical? You can use Federation as a way to enhance the functionality of your search result pages.

The Federated Search Web Part makes it possible to display more than results from OpenSearch (1.0/1.1) sites on your search results page. The Search Server 2008 SDK explains how to include results from SQL Server database queries and search sites that do not expose XML feeds (such as Atom or RSS). In both scenarios, you do this by means of a "connector," a light-weight interface that sends queries to a given location or database, places the results into a structured XML document, and sends that XML to a Federated Search Web Part.

This sample demonstrates how you can extend the connector concept to Web service requests other than basic search queries. It shows how to use a connector to pass an address string to Microsoft's MapPoint Web service in order to obtain the latitude and longitude coordinates for that address. Once you have those coordinates, displaying a Microsoft Virtual Earth map requires only the addition of some Javascript to your Federated Location definition file. See this Codeplex project for the sample code (along with a sample Federated location definition file) and an explanation of how to implement it on your own site.

This sample is part of the Search Community Toolkit

Jim Crowley
Programming Writer
Microsoft Corp

Search Community Toolkit

enterprisesearch — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 23:15:33 GMT

Last week at the SharePoint Conference we announced the Search Community Toolkit which is a set of tools, utilities and samples available from CodePlex to extend and enhance the search features in SharePoint Server 2007, SharePoint Server 2007 for Search and the recently announced Search Server and Search Server Express.

Some of the tools and utilities have been around for a while and have proved very popular such as Faceted Search and others are brand new. Two new additions are;

Search ASP.NET Server Controls - These 2 controls replicate the Search Box and Core Results Web Parts but as ASP.NET Server Controls bound to the search web service. Using these controls on an ASP.NET web site along with Search Search Express will give you powerful .com site search for FREE! As the search web service is identical between SharePoint Server, SharePoint Server for Search and Search Server these controls are compatible with all 3 products and product versions.

Search Center Branding Tool - This tool installs as a SharePoint Feature and allows you to very easily switch off the SharePoint chrome on the Search Center. The tool is primarily focused on Search Server Express and helps you easily brand a standalone instance of Search Server or just remove the default SharePoint look and feel with a single click.

If you want to get involved, have feedback or ideas for other tools then please feel free to get in touch!

Richard Riley
Senior Technical Product Manager
Microsoft Corp

Helper Classes for the SharePoint Server 2007 Search Query Web Service

enterprisesearch — Wed, 03 Oct 2007 05:25:00 GMT

Sometimes, things just kind of grab hold of you, don't they? A corridor conversation leads to quickly popping into a meeting to give a bit of advice, and this leads to suddenly being given actions. And then, the sense of responsibility kicks in and you find yourself going the extra mile and coding something up to help make something easy.

It happened that way when I bumped into a colleague who was just going into a meeting. When the conversation turned to what he was doing, he mentioned that he was going into a meeting to discuss an internal project. It was nothing fancy or super-secret; in fact, it was a problem that I've been helping businesses with for the last few years. We have a series of community sites that are maintained by our technical team leads and subject matter experts. One of our senior managers wanted a single mechanism by which everyone could search all this content as well as publishing information that was relevant to the whole group. I quickly gave my standard "information portal coupled with enterprise search" speech and found myself invited to the meeting to repeat it.

So, I found myself helping out. One of the neat ideas was to use the search capability as an internal research and training exercise so that folks could play with developing a simple Silverlight application. No problem, I thought. This is going to be easy for me as all I have to do is set up the site, configure the search to crawl the team site, and the Silverlight developers can invoke the search web service. I could get the job done with minimum effort and maximum kudos.

Then the sense of responsibility kicked in. As I looked at the search web service, I realised that it would be really helpful if I gave the Silverlight developers a set of helper classes. These helper classes would make it easier for them to submit a query without having to worry about building XML query documents and invoking web services. After a few trials and errors, I ended up with three main classes: QueryRequest, QueryResponse, and MossQuery. The QueryRequest class is used to define the query that will be fired in, MossQuery actually invokes the Search web service and it massages the result to build a QueryResponse.

And then I thought, "Hey, I bet other folks could make use of these classes …" So I wrote an MSDN article that walked through the code and explained how it all worked. I popped the project up on Codeplex and was then invited to write an entry to announce it here.

So, let me know how it goes, and if the code is useful.

And if I bump into another colleague, perhaps there'll be another little coding project for me somewhere else ...

Callum Shillan
Solution Architect

Microsoft Consulting Services UK