People Search not working after adding query

Question

I am creating a scoped people search page only for IT department. Yes I do get people refined only from IT department in people search web-part but however then the refinement panel does not filter results. This is the only problem I have. I added query in Result Query Options as shown in below image to get people only from IT department. The refinement panel works perfect when I remove the Department:"Information Technology" scope from the Query text-box. Even if I interchange values of Fixed Keyword Query and Append Text to Query still the result is same.

I want the refinement panel to work even with these scoped conditions. Has anyone face a problem like this before? I cannot find solution even after searching on web.

Answer 1

Finally I cracked it! The solution to the above problem was to leave the Fixed Keyword Query textbox blank and only write values into Append Text to Query textbox. Because if you write a value in Fixed Keyword Query then it will only show fixed query results ignoring the Refinement Panel and Search Box. The key is to write values into Append Text to Query textbox.

I wrote the value as contentclass:spspeople DepartmentRefinement:"Information Technology" inside Append Text to Query textbox and the refinement panel worked as expected, filtering all the people search results. Note: Here the DepartmentRefinement is my own created Custom Managed Property mapped to People:Department(Text) property.

Note: You can combine multiple values in Append Text to Query textbox separating the values with a space as I have done.