Scope Sharepoint FAST search to a file share

Ok this took a bit of wrangling and some new understandings on my part to understand.

I was trying to index a file share of content, and create a FAST search page that would ONLY search that content. Since the FAST server had tons of other stuff on it, I needed to create a scope to narrow down the search. 

I used this powershell command to create the scope – this is key – you can’t do this from the sharepoint GUI (As of Sharepoint 2010 SP)

New-SPEnterpriseSearchQueryScope -SearchApplication “FAST Search Query SSA” -Name thisisthescopename -Description “A scope for a file share” -DisplayInAdminUI 1 -ExtendedSearchFilter “contentsource:nameofcontentsource”

Some explanation – the -SearchApplication is the name of our FAST query SSA – yours might be named differently

The -ExtendedSearchFilter nees some explanation,

First, the word contentsource needs to be in lower case – I had orignally tried it in mixed case (ContentSource) and that didn’t work

Next, the :nameofcontentsource – this is the artificial name you gave the content source over in your FAST Content SSA – it’s NOT the URL, UNC Path etc.. of the content!

for example, if in your FAST Content SSA, you created a content source on \server1files and called it myfiles

then your ExtendedSearchFilter would look like this: “contentsource:myfiles”

Ok so that’s the end of my explanation of the command itself.

After a few minutes the scope is created and we can test it in a normal FAST search site in sharepoint

Lets say that we indexed a bunch of content on monkeys and we want to see if it turns up in our new scope.

We would search for scope:thisisthescopename monkey

If we get the results we want, then we know the scope is working.

One step beyond this, we can create a special search page for this scope,

create a new FAST search site in sharepoint.

do a bogus search on the sites home page so that it shows you the results page

Edit the results page in the browser

find the web part at the bottom that displays the results

edit that web part

On the right hand side of the page, are the web parts properties, one of them is ‘scope’

put thisisthescopename in that web part and save the page (don’t forget to check in/publish if needed too)

now on your newly modified search page, when you enter a search for monkey, it will limit it to your scope.

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