SharePoint: Cross Site Publishing with Catalog Connections

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Introduction

One of the excellent feature release after SharePoint 2013 is ‘Cross Site Collection Publishing’. Using this feature, we can share multiple result sources between different site collection. For example, if we have 2 site collections

  • Site collection 1 (abc.domain.com)
  • Site collection 2 (xyz.domain.com)

If we need to show content from abc.domain.com to xyz.domain.com we will either need to go via search service 'Content Source' or ‘Cross site publishing’.

Connection details and Setting

We will need to enable Site Collection level feature - "Cross-Site Collection Publishing" on the site collection from where we need to pull the contents.

After enabling feature, go to Setting page of List or Document which needs to be shared to a different site collection. Click on the new link under General Setting - "Catalog connection".

Provide needed settings on the Catalog:

  • Enable the library as a catalog: To enable library as catalog for connection in all other Site collection
  • Enable Anonymous access: To enable list results to be presented Anonymously.
  • Available Fields: List of all the fields which will be available after connecting to this catalog.
  • Navigation Hierarchy: We can construct specific negation token for each item if term store Navigation is enabled.

After providing these setting, give some time for search to crawl and pull these catalogs in all other Site Collections.

Now this catalog connection in available in all other Site Collection to connect.

Under Site Settings -> “Manage Catalogs Connections”

Click: “Connect to a catalog” after some time with crawl we will see newly created Catalog from all different site collection. Connect to the newly created catalog. This will create a 'Search Result Source' linked to new site collection list with all provided settings. We can modify this Result Source as per our need for Sorting and other refinements.

Now this Search Result source is ready to use within code or otherwise and will return results from different site collection.

If we have provided Navigation Hierarchy, these results will have term store specific friendly URLs.

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