June 2016 CU for SharePoint Server 2013 adds Cloud Hybrid Search capability to SharePoint 2013

The June 2016 Cumulative Update for SharePoint Server 2013 which was released on June 14, 2016 adds Cloud Hybrid Search capability to SharePoint 2013. By using cloud hybrid search all crawled content including on-premises content is indexed in search index that resides in Office 365 SharePoint Online. When users perform a search the get results from both on-premises and Office 365 content.

To know more details about the June 2016 CU for SharePoint 2013 visit https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/3115174

Fix for Failed to retrieve blob from URI error in SharePoint 2013 search

I had a standalone SharePoint 2013 server in which I had search service configured. However when I try to crawl the contents the crawl took way too much time and majority of the documents didn’t get crawled. Examining the search crawl log showed strange error message Failed to retrieve blob from URI\\sp2013\gthrsvc_3819458f-2197-4849-a04a-e97e4ead9873-crawl-0\\3c\0x23c.aspx.

I tried methods like

·         Recreating the search service application with a different App Pool

·         Resetting the index and doing a crawl again

·         Giving admin rights to the search service account

But nothing solved the issue. After trying several options I turned to MS forum and got help from Raphel of RioLinx. The issue happens because of insufficient rights for the account to the physical crawl content folder and below are the steps to give permission

1.     Right-click on the C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office Servers\15.0\Data\Office Server\Applications\3819458f-2197-4849-a04a-e97e4ead9873-crawl-0\gthrsvc folder

2.     Select Shared with --> Advance sharing

3.     In the Sharing tab, select "Advanced Sharing"

4.     Check "Share this folder"

5.     In the Share name text box, enter gthrsvc_3819458f-2197-4849-a04a-e97e4ead9873-crawl-0

6.     Select the Permissions button and add WSS_ADMIN_WPG with Full Control

Note: Replace 3819458f-2197-4849-a04a-e97e4ead9873 with the id that is available on your server

After performing the steps all the content were getting crawled and the crawl time also was reduced significantly.

View Managed Property Values in SharePoint 2013 using Search REST API

When setting up SharePoint 2013 search schema a situation may arise where you want see the values associated with the managed properties you have setup. This can be easily achieved using the Search REST API which was introduced in SharePoint 2013. This API allows us to easily view values for any of the managed properties.

To  view results of a particular query we just need to pass the query as querytext parameter to the REST API as shown below

http://<SharePoint Site>/_api/search/query?querytext='<Your Query>’

This will return only the standard managed properties like author, modified etc. In order to make the search REST API return our custom managed properties we need to pass the property names to selectproperties parameter as shown below

http://<SharePoint Site>/_api/search/query?querytext='<Your Query>’ &selectproperties='<customproperty>'

We can view values for multiple managed properties by passing the property names separated by comma to the selectproperties parameter as shown below

http://<SharePoint Site>/_api/search/query?querytext='<Your Query>’ &selectproperties='<customproperty1>,<customproperty1>,<customproperty3>'

For example the below query to Search REST API will return values for the managed properties Title, Color, Brand as shown in the screen shot

http://MYSPServer/_api/search/query?querytext='Samsung ProXpress'&selectproperties='Title,ColorOWSTEXT,BrandOWSTEXT'