Search Service application components in SharePoint Server 2013:

 

As you’re all aware ,there has been a major change in the search architecture on SharePoint Server 2013 when compared to SharePoint server 2010 and in this post I’ll  be discussing on the six different search service components in SharePoint 2013 .It’s very important that all these components are running fine without any issue for the Search service to function seamlessly and surface the results in the search page when a user executes a query in the search center.

Listed below are the six components available in SharePoint 2013 search service:

1. Crawl Component
2. Content processing component
3. Indexing component
4. Query processing component
5. Analytics processing component
6. Search administration component

 Now, let’s take a look on all these components separately …

1.Crawl Component :

This component takes care of crawling the content sources such as (SharePoint sites, websites & file shares etc…) and extracts the crawled properties and metadata and sends that to the content processing component.

2. Content processing component:

This component receives the information from the crawl component and then processes and sends it to the indexing component. It also interacts with the analytics processing component and is responsible for mapping crawled properties to the managed properties.

3. Indexing Component :

This component takes care of receiving the information from the content processing component and writes it to the search index. It also takes care of handling the queries and sends back the results to the Query processing component.

4. Query Processing Component:

This component handles incoming query requests and sends them to the indexing component for results. It also takes care of query optimization.

5. Analytics Processing Component :

This component takes care of analyzing what users are querying on and how they interact with the results.  This information is used to determine relevance, generate recommendations and also used for generating search reports.

6. Search administration Component:

This component manages administrative processes as well as changes to the search topology, such as adding or removing search components and servers.

Please note that these 6 search components can be distributed across multiple servers to provide high availability as well as improve performance as shown in the image below.

Search service application databases:

• Search Administration database :The Search Administration database hosts the Search service application configuration and handles crawl state orchestration, including the content source crawl history.
• Analytics Reporting database :The Analytics Reporting database stores the results for usage analysis reports and extracts information from the Link database when needed.
• Crawl Store database :The Crawl Store database stores the state of each crawled item and provides the crawl queue for items currently being crawled.
• Link database :The Link database stores the information that is extracted by the content processing component and the click through information.

Thanks for reading this post. Happy SharePointing!!!

SharePoint: Group by Year or Month in a View

The following is for SharePoint 2007, SharePoint 2010 and SharePoint Online.

Grouping by Year

Grouping by year is pretty straight forward, just add a calculated column to your list to display the year and then group on that column in a view.
Steps:

1. Add a new column to your list or library
   1. 2007: Click Settings and then Create Column
      2010: In the ribbon click the List or Library tab and click Create Column
   2. Select “Calculated column (calculation based on other columns)”
        
   3. Enter this formula: 
        =YEAR([yourdatecolumn])      example: =YEAR([Due Date])
        
   4. Create or edit a view and in the Group By section select your new calculated column
        
   5. Set the return type to text:
        
   6. Save the view and test

        

Two Problems!

What’s with the 1899 year and why the commas? The commas are because SharePoint, in spite of our selecting “Single line of text”, still thinks the digits are a number. The 1899 year is from items with no date entered.
Fixing the commas…
Easy, just force the result to be text by prefixing the year with an empty string:   “”
=  “”  &  YEAR([Due Date])
    
Fixing the 1899 / no date problem…
Just add an ”IF” to the formula to test for the date.
    =IF(  [Due Date]="" ,  "No Due Date",  ""&YEAR([Due Date])  )
    
The result:


If you want the “No Due Date” listed first, then just add a space before “No”:
  

  

Grouping by Month

The Group By option in a view groups on the entire field. There is no way to group on a part of a field, such as just the month and the year of a date. We can get there by creating a calculated column or two and then grouping on the calculated columns.
We can pull the Month using a formula similar to the one above by using MONTH(). You will need both the year and the month and as SharePoint will sort from left to right you will need to build a string that looks something like “2012/02”, “2012 02” or “2012 / 02”.
When we combine this with the “empty date IF” from above you will get something like this:
  =IF([Due Date]="","No due date",YEAR([Due Date])&"/"&RIGHT("0"&MONTH([Due Date]),2))

The final view:
    

Both Year and Month?

If you wanted to group on Year and then on Month you can:

1. Create both columns described above
   Month:  =IF(  [Due Date]="", "No due date", YEAR([Due Date])&"/"&RIGHT("0"&MONTH([Due Date]),2))
   Year:     =IF(  [Due Date]="", "No Due Date", ""&YEAR([Due Date])  )
2. Create a view and first group on Year and then group on Month

The result:
    

Year, Month and Day?

Sorry, but SharePoint views only support two levels of grouping. If you really need to do this then you can use SharePoint Designer to create a Data View Web Part to group to any number of levels. See here:http://techtrainingnotes.blogspot.com/2011/01/sharepoint-group-by-on-more-than-2.html

Group Headings

If you want to get rid of the group heading then see this article:
http://techtrainingnotes.blogspot.com/2009/06/sharepoint-removing-group-headings-from.html
That article is for SharePoint 2007. There are both 2007 and 2010 versions available in my book.