This documentation relates to an earlier version of the SharePoint Connector.
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Search querying is simply the act of a user going to a page within SharePoint (or even Confluence using the SharePoint theme) and performing a search such that the SharePoint search results screen is shown.

This page assumes you have already performed the SharePoint Search Configuration. If not, please visit that link and perform the steps outlined there.

This page assumes that you have successfully crawled the content as discussed on Troubleshooting Crawl Configuration and Execution.

If you are not seeing the expected search results after successfully crawling your data the steps defined on this page may help.

Security Trimmer

Once Confluence has been successfully crawled, the primary complexity left is due to a security trimmer which runs at query time. The crawler may have access to all Confluence content, but the security trimmer ensures that the current user is only shown search results that their account has access to within Confluence. The fact that this security trimmer is in place is the likely cause of any issues once you have successfully performed a crawl.

  1. If you are searching file attachments to a Confluence wiki page, verify that you can search the file when it is in a SharePoint document library. If not, then it is likely that you need to install the appropriate IFilter and set up an entry in the File Types within search administration. Note that by default SharePoint can search the contents of all major Office documents, but not other documents such as PDF files.
  2. Verify the proper version of the Permission Checker plugin.
    • Review Install the Confluence Plugin documentation to make sure the Permission Checker plugin is the correct version based on your version of Confluence.

      This is a crucial step that is easy to have set up wrong. Please be careful here to note the versions of the plugin.

  3. Verify that the security trimmer has access to Confluence.
    • Log into SharePoint as a site administrator and go to your search results page (e.g., http://sharepoint.mycompany.com/search/results.aspx).
    • Go into site settings (Site Actions > Site Settings). You may see a sub-menu under Site Settings. If so, choose 'Modify All Site Settings'.
    • Choose the "Confluence Settings" link under the Site Administration group.
    • Click the "Test Confluence Configuration Button".

      If the test fails, then the search security trimmer will not be able to communicate with Confluence and all search results will be trimmed out (not available). You can change the settings here on the Confluence Settings screen, but you likely need to change the settings at the Confluence Settins screen for the root site in your site collection (if the search site is not the search site) unless you have multiple Confluence installations that you are having SharePoint integrate with. Those settings propogate down to sub-sites unless they have been modified at the sub-site level. If you still have trouble after changing your settings, skip down to Tracing further below.

      If you are using a version of Confluence up to and including 3.0.1 and are seeing no results, Sharepoint may not be able to communicate with Confluence. See Sharepoint Connector returns no search results from Confluence.

      Note that if you do have multiple Confluence installations, a single SharePoint search site can only show search results from one Confluence installation due to the fact that the security trimmer is configured to communicate through Confluence at the SharePoint site level. This is documented as CSI-109.

      The above steps are illustrated in SharePoint Feature Configuration, but one primary difference is that the steps above require that you do this from within the context of the search results site, not the root site within your site collection as discussed at the link provided.

  4. Verify the user has access to the Confluence page you are searching for within SharePoint.
    • If you haven't already done so, ensure that a particular wiki page within Confluence has been crawled as discussed on Troubleshooting Crawl Configuration and Execution. Make sure this is a wiki page and not a news page, mail page etc.
    • Log into SharePoint as a site administrator and go to your search results page as done in the previous step.
    • Edit the search results page and add the Confluence Page web part as discussed on Using the SharePoint Feature.
    • Configure the Confluence Page web part to display the page you want to search.

      If you cannot display the page in the Confluence Page web part, then you should verify that the account you are logged into SharePoint as has access to the page within Confluence when logged into Confluence. If that account cannot have that access, log into SharePoint as an account that does and then configure the Confluence Page web part to point to your particular page. Note that this other account may not have the ability to add the web part to the page, but any account that has access to the SharePoint search results page should have the ability to personalize the properites to point to the Confluence page. If you are still having problems, see Tracing further below.

  5. If the both of the above steps are successful but search results are still not shown, verify that duplicate collapsing is not causing a problem.
    Duplicate Collapsing

    In some environments a SharePoint feature known as duplicate collapsing causes search results to be removed altogether. What happens is that by default results that SharePoint deems as duplicate results are collapsed into a single result/URL. However, the security trimmer not only trims out pages a user doesn't have access to, but it also trims out print preview pages. What can happen is that the duplicate results are collapsed to the print preview result which is trimmed out by the security trimmer and therefore no results are shown for a page. To remedy this situation we simply turn off duplicate collapsing. See also CSI-244.

    * Log into SharePoint as a site administrator and go to your search results page as done in the previous steps.
  • Choose Site Actions -> Edit page as done in the previous step.
  • Find the "Search Core Results" web part and choose "Modified Shared Web Part" from its edit menu.
  • Uncheck the checkbox for "Remove Duplicate Results", then click OK.
  • Perform a search for your page.

    You may notice that "Enable Search Term Stemming" is checked in the image above. This is off by default. If you turn it on then you will display search results for matches of different variations of the search term(s) used (e.g., searching for "ran" will show results on pages that have "run").

  1. Review the Known Issues to see if any are relevant to your environment or the query you are performing.

If your search still fails, see Tracing below.

Tracing

Enable tracing as discussed on Tracing the SharePoint Feature. You will need to perform an IISRESET after doing this.

Note that trace data is sometimes not flushed properly resulting in skipped trace output. If you feel this is the case for your environment, you will want to configure the tracing to immediately flush to a file as discussed on Tracing the SharePoint Feature.

Below are trace results for a successful and unsuccessful queries. Click on the thumbnail images to see a the full view of the results.

Trace Results for a Successful Query

Trace Results for an Unsuccessful Query

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