How to Search on Last Modified By field in SharePoint Advanced Search

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If you are wondering why you are unable to find any search result for Last Modified By filed in Advanced Search of SharePoint then don’t worry, you are not alone. This is one of the bug which still exist in SharePoint 2007 Server Search engine. I have found a solution posted by Pritam Dhake ina  SharePoint forum. I have used this solution and it works like a charm.

Here are the steps to manually hook the Last Modified By field to the creawled field.

  1. Open Central administration -> Shared Services -> SharedServices (X being the number of the shared services provider for the site you are creating a mapping)  – > search settings -> metadata property mappings 
  2. Click “Modifiedby” to edit the properties 
  3. Make sure  “Include values from all crawled properties mapped” is selected
  4. Click “add mapping” and select the “Office” category from the dropdown list. 
  5. look for a property named “OFFICE:8” , click “OK”
  6. Click “add mapping” and select the “ows_Last_x0020_Modified(text)” from the ALL categories dropdown list, Click “OK”
  7. Make sure the box is checked “Allow this property to be used in scopes”, click “OK”
  8. Click on “Crawled Properties” link on the left side of the Shared Services Administration page. 
  9. Click On the “Office” Category.
  10. The mapped property you just created should be listed in the “Mapped To” column of the Office:8(Text) category.
  11. Click on the Office:8(Text) category to view the properties.
  12. In the “name and information” section, you should see the “property Set ID:” value is  ‘F29F85E0-4FF9-1068-AB91-08002B27B3D9‘ …This is very important!!!
  13. In the “Mappings to managed properties” section the managed property you edited in steps 2 – 7 should be listed. 
  14. The box to “Include values for this property in the search index” should be checked.
  15. Click “OK” to exit this page.
  16. Open “Shared Services administration” -> “ShareservicesX” -> “Search Settings” -> “Content Sources and crawl schedules” 
  17. Click on “Local Office SharePoint Server sites” to expand the dropdown list and select “Start full crawl” 
  18. When the crawl has completed, navigate to the site collection -> click on the search tab. 
  19. Select “Advanced Search” 
  20. In the properties dropdown list select “Last Modified By“
  21. Select contains
  22. Enter a name that you know has added / edited a document
  23. Click the magnifier to execute the search
  24. Get back results.
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4 thoughts on “How to Search on Last Modified By field in SharePoint Advanced Search”

  1. Thanks for that. i thought I was going mad and couldn’t believe that no one else had noticed this before!

    However, I’m having the same problem with the “Created By” and “Last Modified Date” properties as well. I’ve solved the Last Modified Date by performing the following but am still stuck with Created By.

    Last Modified Date
    ——————
    Have you noticed that in the XSLT for both the Advanced Search and Search Core Results web parts that it refers to something called “Write”??

    There is no metdata propety for this but there must be some kind of hidden Office value because although I can’t search on it, the results web part prints values for it just fine.

    The LastModifiedTime metadata property includes the following mappings, none of which are indexed – Basic:14(Date and Time), Basic:16(Date and Time), ows_Modified(Date and Time).

    I’ve changed my Advanced Search XSLT to use this and can now successfully search by Last Modified Date. But if you do the same in the Core Results web part nothing gets written back – so you have to use Write!

    Weirder still is that an advanced search on Last Modified Date will return correct corresponding values to the Write display in the search results.

    I’d love it if you could explain this or find a better solution.

    Hope this helps someone else.

    • Hi FR, thanks for the tip. I managed to get it sorted.

      BTW the reference you gave is my own blog post documenting my findings and the solution. 🙂

      If you read the comments at the end of that post, you may notice that someone has also offered a solution to the issue with search “Contains”. I haven’t tried it yet but understand there are good performance reason behind MS dropping it from MOSS.

  3. Hi,

    In the query string how can I look for files modified before a certain date??

    ..&datemodified=<10/10/2010

    Would this work?

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