Make SharePoint search results link to document instead of DispForm.aspx with no iFilter

Question

We are storing quite a lot of pdf documents (images with no dual layer text) and do not wish to add a pdf iFilter (with the resultant storage and search performance costs).

As we do not have an iFilter, SharePoint crawls the documents as list items (bringing back the metadata only) and displays the result link as a link to the DispForm.aspx instead of to the actual document.

How do I get Search to return the results witha link to the document itself instead of DispForm.aspx?

I want something easier than a custom PDF iFilter that ignores the document content or hacking the search result fields into a document link.

Answer 1

I had this problem and found a solution. I had to make sure the PDF file type was added to the list of file types on my search service application.

To verify this go to Central Admin > Manage service applications > Search service (your instance) > File Types (found under the crawling section). If pdf isn't there then add it. Once I restarted the search service, reset the index and ran a full crawl. The search results now linked to the document itself instead of the DispForm.aspx. I have no iFilter installed.

Hopefully this helps.

Answer 2

Well, first off, have you checked what data you're getting back in the response to your search? Try changing your results display for a while to see the XML returned, by changing the XSL. If the information you're after isn't there (I suspect it might be), you might be able to add another managed property to the response from the search service.

You may also find that you need to treat PDF documents differently to other types - you can add the file extension to the query and then change your XSL to handle .PDFs differently