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Case-insensitive sort order in FAST Search for SharePoint 2010

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By default FAST search sort is based on ASCII sort order. Therefore, sorting will follow [0-9A-Za-z] as pattern i.e. Numeric values will be followed by capital letter followed by small letter words in ascending sort.

In order to change the order to be case insensitive, we need to a change the fullsort profile. Index-profile contains details for each managed metadata property and sort profile needs to be changed in the same place. In the FAST installation folder inside index-profiles locate the file "deployment-ready-index-profile.xml". [ We should take back up of existing file before any changes, so that we can revert back to original settings as needed]

Add this for the relevant property: <fullsort profile="generic" />

 

For example:

deafult value:     <field fullsort="yes" ..................... name="PropertyName" description=""/>

Modified value:  <field fullsort="yes" ..................... name="PropertyName" description=""><fullsort profile="generic" /></field>

After doing a full crawl data will be presented in case-insensitive order for the given property. We can further set the order as ascending or descending as required.

This post has a similar discussion on this subject.

 One of the limitation of this implementation is that once a new metadata managed property is added or an existing one gets deleted the index-profile file is re-generated. The newly generated file does not retain the modfied values.

Comments

  • Anonymous
    May 03, 2012
    You must remove the fullsort="yes" attribute from the field element, or the following fullsort element will be treated as a duplicate and ignored. But I have not figured out how to set this sort profile as default, or how to apply it in a manner that is not overwritten. The sort order file for latin character sets are ok for English I guess, but useless for other languages. But they can be modified. For Norwegian, the codes for æÆøØåÅ should be moved to the end of the latin.xml file. Other characters should probably be moded too. (By default øÆåÅ sorts as A, and øØ sorts as O.)

  • Anonymous
    July 31, 2012
    Please note that changing the deployment-ready-index-profile.xml by any way is unsupported.

  • Anonymous
    July 31, 2012
    Thanks Nicolas for pointing this out.

  • Anonymous
    March 07, 2013
    Nicolas, Why then, is it mentioned here? support.microsoft.com/.../2017290

  • Anonymous
    December 09, 2013
    That support article is for FAST ESP, not FAST Search for SharePoint 2010.  Lots of features from ESP are locked out and unsupported in FS4SP.