Custom Refinement Panel option on People Search returns no results

Question

I am creating a staff list for the company and have set up an Enterprise Search Center and all is working great. I would like the refinement panel to list the Departments in the company so people can quickly and easy filter by department.

I have added the following to the Filter Category Definition in the refinement panel:

<Category Title="Department" Description="Use this filter to restrict results by department" Type="Microsoft.Office.Server.Search.WebControls.ManagedPropertyFilterGenerator"    MetadataThreshold="3" NumberOfFiltersToDisplay="20" MaxNumberOfFilters="20" SortBy="Name" SortDirection="Ascending" ShowMoreLink="False" MappedProperty="Department" />

Which shows a list of our departments in the refinement panel - great! Problem is, when I click on any department I get no results returned, rather than seeing the people in that department.

The URL after clicking on one of the departments is:

http://domain/sites/Search/Pages/peopleresults.aspx?r=department%3D%22Accounts%22

Can anyone suggest what I'm doing wrong?

Thank you, this is driving me nuts!

Answer 1

Did you create the mapped property "Department" mentioned in the refinement panel? If not, create the mapped property and perform a full crawl again. Follow the instructions in this post which does the same.

Good Luck .

Answer 2

I had the same problem while trying to use the default Department field as a refinement filter, once I set "Allow this property to be used in scopes" on the Managed Property it started working.

Answer 3

Ari Bakker wrote a blog that walks you through the entire process of what your trying to accomplish here: http://www.sharepointconfig.com/2011/05/how-to-create-a-simple-sharepoint-2010-people-directory/

He even points out the issue with the department property. You could always make the department proerty a managemend metadata property and it will automatically get addeded to the refinement panel. :)