It would seem like the simplest thing in the world: show results in the PnP Modern Search Results Web Part in alphabetical order. My wanting to do this led to multiple conversations with my search guru Mikael Svenson (@mikaelsvenson) and the uncovering of some really useful variants on RefinableString in the SharePoint Online Managed Properties.

The new(ish? – it’s not clear how long they have been there) pre-created Managed Properties which are variants of RefinableString are now documented in Manage the search schema in SharePoint – SharePoint in Microsoft 365 | Microsoft Learn. Until I offered some updates recently, these variants weren’t in the article. I’m not sure I’d ever found this article before, but it seems to be the canonical list of Refinable Managed Properties, along with a lot of useful information about the Search Schema.

The new (to me, anyway) ones are in the last four rows of the following table in that article:

Managed property type	Count	Multi	Query	Search	Retrieve	Refine	Sort	Managed property name range	Notes
Date	10	–	Query	–	–	–	–	Date00 to Date09
Date	20	Multi	Query	–	Retrieve	Refine	Sort	RefinableDate00 to RefinableDate19
Date	2	–	Query	–	Retrieve	Refine	Sort	RefinableDateInvariant00 to RefinableDateInvariant01	*
Date	5	–	Query	–	Retrieve	Refine	Sort	RefinableDateSingle00 to RefinableDateSingle04
Decimal	10	–	Query	–	–	–	–	Decimal00 to Decimal09
Decimal	10	Multi	Query	–	Retrieve	Refine	Sort	RefinableDecimal00 to RefinableDecimal09
Double	10	–	Query	–	–	–	–	Double00 to Double09
Double	10	Multi	Query	–	Retrieve	Refine	Sort	RefinableDouble00 to RefinableDouble09
Integer	50	–	Query	–	–	–	–	Int00 to Int49
Integer	50	Multi	Query	–	Retrieve	Refine	Sort	RefinableInt00 to RefinableInt49
String	200	Multi	Query	–	Retrieve	Refine	Sort	RefinableString00 to RefinableString199
String	40	Multi	Query	–	Retrieve	Refine	Sort	RefinableStringFirst00 to RefinableStringFirst39	*
String	10	Multi	Query	–	Retrieve	Refine	Sort	RefinableStringLn00 to RefinableStringLn09	**
String	50	–	Query	–	Retrieve	Refine	Sort	RefinableStringWbOff00 to RefinableStringWbOff49	***
String	50	Multi	Query	–	Retrieve	Refine	Sort	RefinableStringWbOffFirst00 to RefinableStringWbOffFirst49	*, ***

* Mappings to crawled properties – Include content from the first crawled property that is not empty, based on the specified order.
** Language neutral word breaker
*** Complete Matching

As you can see, each of the additional RefinableString* Managed Properties has something a little different about it, as indicated in the Notes.

Need to know more? Feel free to ask your questions in the comments.

Resources

• Manage the search schema in SharePoint – SharePoint in Microsoft 365 | Microsoft Learn
• How Do Site Columns Become Managed Properties – Thus Available for Search? | Microsoft Learn
• Introduction – PnP Modern Search (v4) (microsoft-search.github.io)
• Sort by Filename · Issue #2351 · microsoft-search/pnp-modern-search (github.com)

This is a quick tip about a SNAFU which caught me up today. I got to do a “Doh!” in front of a client, which is always fun. Hopefully this will save you the same embarrassment.

Filtering News pages based on some metadata applied to the pages is a thing, and has been for a good, long time. I knew it should work, and pretty easily at that.

When I was on the call, I had added a metadata column to the Site Pages library. Simple. I went and put the page with the News Web Part into edit mode and looked in the Filter section for Page properties. No joy. Instead I was seeing:

Managed Properties are awesome, and I set them up all the time so I can build search-driven solutions, usually with the PnP Modern Search Web Parts, which, as I’ve said before, are the bees knees. But I knew there should be an option to filter based on Page properties instead. Had something changed? Was it better? I wasn’t sure.

I fired up my MVP communication channel and asked if things had indeed changed. As I expected, Susan Hanley (@susanhanley) responded almost right away.

Look to see what the Source is for News. When it is a single site (i.e., the site you are on), you can filter using Page properties. When you are selecting news from multiple sites, you will not see the Page Properties option – just Managed property.

Doh! I hadn’t even though to check that setting! A simple change at the top of the News Web Part properties to use This site as the source, and Page properties was back where I expected it.

This makes sense if you think about it. The Page properties in Site Pages libraries probably wouldn’t be consistent across multiple sites, so Managed properties makes more sense. Within one site, the Site Pages library is a single source, so has to be consistent with itself.

I do think there could be some in-Web-Part assistance for this with a slightly better UI, though. Maybe just an info bubble like the Enable audience targeting section right below it?

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As you might expect, Greg Zelfond (@gregoryzelfond) has a great post about all this if you want to understand it better:

How to manage categories of news using custom metadata – SharePoint Maven