SharePoint search is very flexible.  Learn how to enrich your clients Search Experience.

Attachments for this post: Star Ratings

SharePoint search is a wonderful thing. It allows us to find relevant documents and information very quickly, but sometimes we want to present the core results a little differently than the standard output. This blog entry shows you how to do this. The Search Core Results Web Part XSLT Transformation (XSLT) is used to transform the search results appear on search results pages.

Before you begin to modify the XSLT for the Search Core Results Web Part, you will need to get a hold of Visual Studio 2005 so that you can easily look at XML as well as debug XSLT. So the first thing we need to do is to get a copy of the what the results XML data contains as well as the XSLT that is used to transform this XML into HTML. To achieve this do the following:

This opens the Text Entry window for the Web Part's XSL property. You can modify the XSLT directly in this window; however, you may find it easier to copy the code to a file. You can then edit that file using an application such as Visual Studio 2005. After you have finished editing the file, you can copy the modified code back into the Text Entry window and save your changes to the Search Core Results Web Part. So copy the contents of the Edit Window and from within Visual Studio, create a new XSLT file and paste the contents of the clipboard into the new file. Save a copy of this file to your local hard disk. Call it something like SearchOld.xslt.

1. To dump the xml results so we can use it later on to debug our XSLT, replace the default XSLT with the following:

This XSLT does not perform any actual transformation, so the search results will display the raw XML data.

1. Click OK to save the changes to the Web Part.

The search results are rendered again without the formatting provided by the XSLT. Select the XML results and again from within Visual Studio, create a new XML file and paste the clipboard contents after the starting <?xml ...> tag of the new file. Save this new file to your hard disk. Call it something like SearchCoreResults.xml.

1. From within Visual Studio, open the SearchOld.xslt that we saved previously and save it as SearchNew.xslt.
2. Open the properties window of the file (F4) and browse to the SearchCoreResult.xml from the input property. This tells Visual Studio that we are going to use the XML that we saved previously as a source for our XSLT.
3. We can now debug the XSLT, by selecting Debug XSLT from the XML menu. This allows us to step through, inspect 'variables' etc. more or less in the traditional way.

1. Once you have made the required changes to your new XSLT, you can copy and paste the contents of the file into Search Core Results XSLT property of your search page. If it doesn't work then you can revert back to the old XSLT (SearchOld.xslt) or close the Core Results web part from the contents page:

1. add ?contents=1 as a parameter to the search results page,
2. select checkout
3. Check the checkbox next to the Core Search Results web part
4. Click the close action
5. Go back to the search results page and add another core search results web part.

The ins and outs of XSLT as well as the structure of the Core Search Results web part are a little beyond the scope of this blog, but this should give you some idea on what needs to be done.

Attached is a ZIP file which contains an XSLT used to generate the results as show in the screen cap below (to further enhance the search results I have downloaded and installed faceted search from the www.codeplex.com web site). The ZIP file also contains a few images used to display the ranking stars. Rank is a search property that is returned to score the relevance of a search item. The value is usually ranges from 0 to 1000. I have taken advantage of this to generate a star rating. To use this create a picture library called Helper Images referenced from the home page (/Helper Images). Upload the star images to this picture library.