Automatically generated managed property not being populated after change to search schema

Question

In my SharePoint site, I have a managed metadata site column called 'Item Category' and it was mapped to two different managed properties in the search schema - the first managed property being 'RefinableString01' (mapped via the crawled property 'ows_Item_x0020_Category') and the second being 'owstaxIditemx0200category' (automatically generated and mapped to crawled property 'ows_taxId_item_x0020_category).

I added 'ows_taxId_item_x0020_category' as an additional mapping to 'RefinableString01' but quickly realised that this didn't achieve a result I originally intended, so removed that mapping. I also added 'ows_taxId_item_x0020_category' as a mapping to 'owstaxIditemx0020category' which appears to have overwritten the automatic settings with default managed property settings, as I'm no longer getting the warning message for automatic mappings at the top of the administration page for 'owstaxIditemx0200category'.

I've now spotted that the search index doesn't seem to be populated with values against either of those managed properties now, at least judging from content search web parts which used those managed properties now no longer returning a value for them against items in the display template (but still returning values for other managed properties I didn't modify). I have re-indexed the site web but this has no effect. I also don't have any prompts in the Result Types settings page to update any properties.

In this situation what would be the best way to fix the issue of the managed properties not being populated? For example, is there a way to revert the automatically generated managed property back to its original settings, and would this resolve the issue?

I also have an added constraint that my administrative rights are limited to SCA and that there is a very long 'line of sight' to any tenant level administrator.

Answer 1

Whenever SharePoint search is acting funny the first step should be to verify the raw results and the best tool for that is the SP Search Query tool, https://github.com/SharePoint/PnP-Tools/tree/master/Solutions/SharePoint.Search.QueryTool Once you have verified that then you could try to map the taxid crawled property to a managed property or use it from the alltags managed property