Dude! Where’s my FAST Search Center (February 2011 CU)?

Posted Wednesday, April 13, 2011 8:59 AM by CoreyRoth

To date, I’ve written a few posts on issues that may occur when you are looking to create a search center.  Sometimes the site template isn’t present or you receive an error.  I recently encountered another issue with the FAST Search Center.  The site template was present on the root site collection but it wasn’t present on another site collection.  I decided to do some investigating to figure out what the cause was.

image

I decided to go take a look at the XML files for the site templates in 14\TEMPLATE\1033\XML.  There I looked for the file that was most likely search related which happened to be webtempsrch.xml.  I saw a listing for all of the usual site templates including one for the FAST Search Center.  When I examined the configuration, I noticed that there was an attribute called VisibilityFeatureDependency as you can see in the snippet below.

<Template Name="SRCHCENTERFAST" ID="2000">

<Configuration ID="0" Title="FAST Search Center" Hidden="FALSE" ImageUrl="/_layouts/images/template_fast_srch_cen.png" Description="A site for delivering the FAST search experience. The welcome page includes a search box with two tabs: one for general searches, and another for searches for information about people. You can add and customize tabs to focus on other search scopes or result types." DisplayCategory="Enterprise"  VisibilityFeatureDependency="5EAC763D-FBF5-4d6f-A76B-EDED7DD7B0A5" >

  </Configuration>

</Template>

The next step was to determine what that feature was so I opened PowerShell and issued the following command.

Get-SPFeature –id 5EAC763D-FBF5-4d6f-A76B-EDED7DD7B0A5

SearchExtensionsFeaturePowerShell

It references a feature called SearchExtensions.  It’s responsible for deploying the Visual Best Bet web part among other things.  To enable the feature I just used the Enable-SPFeature command that I have talked about before using the URL to my site collection.

Enable-SPFeature –Id SearchExtensions –url http://sp2010/sites/deployment

image

Once I enable that feature, I go back to the site collection and use the New Site menu and sure enough there is my FAST Search Center.

image

I have my FAST search center back now and that is good, but I have never had an issue with this before.  I decided to check another farm.  In the above case, I was using February 2011 CU.  I went back and checked my RTM build.  I started by opening webtempsrch.xml again.  It took me a second, but I realized that the feature GUID is different as shown below.

<Template Name="SRCHCENTERFAST" ID="2000">

<Configuration ID="0" Title="FAST Search Center" Hidden="FALSE" ImageUrl="/_layouts/images/template_fast_srch_cen.png" Description="A site for delivering the FAST search experience. The welcome page includes a search box with two tabs: one for general searches, and another for searches for information about people. You can add and customize tabs to focus on other search scopes or result types." DisplayCategory="Enterprise"  VisibilityFeatureDependency="8581A8A7-CF16-4770-AC54-260265DDB0B2" >

  </Configuration>

</Template>

That GUID listed in the RTM file (8581A8A7-CF16-4770-AC54-260265DDB0B2) is for the PremiumSite feature not SearchExtensions like I showed above.  I took a look at the dates on the files and I noticed that webtempsrch.xml has a date of 1/19/2011 on the February 2011 CU build.  The previous date was 1/9/2010.  They changed it.  I’m not sure why it changed, but I’m going to consider this a minor bug and will be reporting it.  At least it’s easy to work around. 

Comments

# re: Dude! Where’s my FAST Search Center (February 2011 CU)?

Friday, June 17, 2011 2:42 PM by Paul Slager

Awesome this helped me see it I had the exact same problem.  However, I still get an error when I try to add the template.  

Name=Request (POST:sharepointapp/.../newsbweb.aspx)       473386f9-90d6-487b-94ba-fefdee4f586f

06/17/2011 14:33:34.26 w3wp.exe (0x0E00)                       0x0698  SharePoint Foundation                 Logging Correlation Data                      xmnv     Medium               Site=/    473386f9-90d6-487b-94ba-fefdee4f586f

06/17/2011 14:33:34.33 w3wp.exe (0x0E00)                       0x0698  SharePoint Foundation                 Fields                                    88y1                Medium               No document templates uploaded for list "$Resources:core,MasterPageGallery;" -- none found for list template "100".         473386f9-90d6-487b-94ba-fefdee4f586f

06/17/2011 14:33:34.55 w3wp.exe (0x0E00)                       0x0698  SharePoint Foundation                 Monitoring                         b4ly                High       Leaving Monitored Scope (Creating Web s). Execution Time=236.965591995631 473386f9-90d6-487b-94ba-fefdee4f586f

06/17/2011 14:33:34.55 w3wp.exe (0x0E00)                       0x0698  SharePoint Foundation                 General                                       85m6     Medium               Applying web template 'SRCHCENTERFAST#0' on web url 'http://sharepointapp/s'                473386f9-90d6-487b-94ba-fefdee4f586f

06/17/2011 14:33:34.55 w3wp.exe (0x0E00)                       0x0698  SharePoint Foundation                 General                                       85m7     Medium               Actual web template to apply to Url 'http://sharepointapp/s' is 'SRCHCENTERFAST#0'                473386f9-90d6-487b-94ba-fefdee4f586f

06/17/2011 14:33:34.55 w3wp.exe (0x0E00)                       0x0698  SharePoint Foundation                 General                                       72h7      Medium               Applying template "SRCHCENTERFAST#0" to web at URL "http://sharepointapp/s".                473386f9-90d6-487b-94ba-fefdee4f586f

06/17/2011 14:33:34.58 w3wp.exe (0x0E00)                       0x0698  SharePoint Foundation                 General                                88jb                Medium               Feature Activation: Activating Feature 'Publishing' (ID: '22a9ef51-737b-4ff2-9346-694633fe4416') at URL http://sharepointapp/s.      473386f9-90d6-487b-94ba-fefdee4f586f

06/17/2011 14:33:34.58 w3wp.exe (0x0E00)                       0x0698  SharePoint Foundation                 General                                75fb                Medium               Calling 'FeatureActivated' method of SPFeatureReceiver for Feature 'Publishing' (ID: '22a9ef51-737b-4ff2-9346-694633fe4416').                473386f9-90d6-487b-94ba-fefdee4f586f

06/17/2011 14:33:34.58 w3wp.exe (0x0E00)                       0x0698  Web Content Management                        Publishing Provisioning                       1ght       High       Publishing Feature activation event handled.      473386f9-90d6-487b-94ba-fefdee4f586f

# re: Dude! Where’s my FAST Search Center (February 2011 CU)?

Monday, June 20, 2011 4:00 PM by CoreyRoth

@Paul Verify the GUID of the FeatureVisibilityDependency and make sure it is activated on your site collection.

# re: Dude! Where’s my FAST Search Center (February 2011 CU)?

Tuesday, September 20, 2011 1:51 PM by Shola Salako

Awesome troubleshooting tip for finding missing templates.  Thanks!

# re: Dude! Where’s my FAST Search Center (February 2011 CU)?

Thursday, September 29, 2011 5:29 AM by Sumit Arora

Great post, it helped a lot !!

# re: Dude! Where’s my FAST Search Center (February 2011 CU)?

Wednesday, January 18, 2012 3:09 PM by Johnny Rotten

Brilliant, thanks! Works on my oct-2011 dev box

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