Paging for Federated Results in SharePoint 2010

The Federated Search capabilities in SharePoint 2010 allow you to issue a search query against other external search providers and have this shown in line with your local search results.

Now this is all well and good but recently a client asked me is it possible to have pagination available for these search results? Out of the box you will only see a pre-configured amount of results displayed as configured in the ‘Results Per Page’ option.

However there is a way to be able to page through these results which instead of using a Federated Results web part we use a Search Core Results web part and simply assign the Location property as our Federated Source. Then if the Federated Location is correctly set up we will have paging.

So first thing is first, add a Search Core Results Web Part to the page, I’m putting it in the Right Zone of the default search results page:

Then edit the web part and choose your federated location as the Location.

Click OK and you are ready to go. If you now use pagination for your SharePoint results you will see your Bing results adjust as well, cool.

Also to let you know how this happens behind the scenes when you create your FLD file you have a query template. In that query template there are a number parameters that you can pass. For instance {searchTerms} is the actual search term and {startItem} and {itemsPerPage} will be substituted with the values that SharePoint passes in.

Therefore when a search is fired the search term and startItem parameters are replaced, allowing pagination to occur.

Tags: search, search query

Category: General, How To