Ben There, Done That

We have been having an issue with our search indexing and crawling in one of our SharePoint farms.  The problem is that after an undetermined set of time, pretty much all search queries wind up returning several results that show nothing but an IE icon.  The result isn’t attached or any page or give any textual information.  Obviously best case would be to figure out what causes this error, but at this point in time we haven’t been able to find the problem.

However, what we have discovered is that simply resetting the search index and running a full crawl will solve the issue.

So…until we can solve the issues, I wrote a small SharePoint timer job that simply resets our search index right before a scheduled full crawl runs.  I used Andrew Connell’s post (http://www.andrewconnell.com/blog/articles/CreatingCustomSharePointTimerJobs.aspx) to develop the Timer Job, Solution and Feature and modified it and was able to find the following code on http://www.sharepointdev.net/sharepoint--development-programming/programmatically-reset-all-crawled-content-41959.shtml that I inserted into the timer job frame work in order to automatically reset our index on a regular schedule to minimize the risk of our search issue effecting the end users.

try
{
    SearchContext sc = SearchContext.GetContext(ServerContext.Default);
    sc.Reset(true);
}
catch (Exception ex)
{
    throw new InvalidOperationException("Unable to reset content index.", ex);
}

For some of you, this may not seem like much, but coming from the SharePoint Administration/Configuration side of SharePoint and having very little real development experience I was rather proud of myself.