Crawl and index fileserver and add metadata to index based on location on fileserver?

Question

I have a fileserver, containing 500'000 documents which should be crawled. Upon search, the result page displays the title, part of document content and the fileserver path. So far so god.

But I want to use refiners on the search result start page based on metadata following the path on the fileserver. As an example, the fileserver path structure looks like this:

C:\region\customer\project\

This structure is followed without deviation. I can extraxt the folder structure and import it to term store, but there would be no use, since the documents aren't tagged with metadata.

So is there a way to simply add metadata to the index on each document based on the location on the fileserver?

Answer 1

What you're looking for is Content Enrichment.

SharePoint 2013 enables you to add your own modules to the content processing pipeline and thus enrich your content before it gets stored in the index.

You can add new refiners based on existing managed properties (the file path).

Hope this helps.

Luis

Answer 2

If you just need a refiner and don't plan to use the metadata in any other way, you could also just write a better refiner that solves the refinement issue. With a few lines of javascript you can change the presentation of the refiner rather than writing a Content Enrichment Service.