SharePoint 2010 refinement panel

When you do a search in SharePoint 2010 and land on the results page, by default on the left you will see the refinement panel. This panel will show up if there are enough results being returned by the system. I think default the minimum is five.

At some point you might want to add your own custom categories. This is already explained in a lot of other posts but I want to make some things clear. Things that are sometimes incorrectly postulated in some articles.

If you want to add your own category, edit the options of the refinements panel and open the 'Refinement' category. You will want to edit the 'Filter Category Definition' xml. (tip: for easy editing, copy paste the XML here to reformat: http://www.shell-tools.net/index.php?op=xml_format).

You will notice that each category is represented by a 'Category' tag with all kinds of options. Basicaly, you just need to copy paste such a tag and edit its options. Don't forget to turn off the 'Use Default Configuration' option or none of your changes will be saved.

1. Create a managed property for your custom category. Anything of which you can make a managed property, can be used as a category (as far as I know).

2. The 'Type' property can end with 'ManagedPropertyFilterGenerator' for any column that is not a managed metadata column or 'TaxonomyFilterGenerator' if the column is a managed metadata column.

3. Your managed metadata does not have to be in lower case for it to show up. Just use the casing you used.

4. Very important property to notice is the 'MetadataThreshold' option. This option defines how many times the column must appear in the search results before the category becomes visible in the refinement panel.

5. Tip: you can only create a managed property from a column that is actually being used. So there must be at least one item which has the metadata column and it must have data. You must then crawl the complete system for it to become available when configuring managed properties.

6. Tip: First make sure you can search your managed property by typing this in the search box: 'managedPropertyName: valueToSearch'.

7. Tip: if your managed metadata does not exist (not configured or typo in the XML), the refinement panel will tell you. So if you configured it correctly and no error message is shown, check if the other options are ok.