How to add more facets to Faceted Search XSLT

The situation is that I created a demo portal with a lot of sites each with a document library. Some sites are location sites, others are department sites etc. The document library on the location sites each have a site column (metadata) with a prefilled value corresponding with the name of the site and the document libraries on the department sites also have a site column prefilled with a value corresponding to the site name.

So I wanted to have two facets added to my Faceted Search on my searchresults page and followed the configuration guide I downloaded from Codeplex. According to the documentation I added the following code to the XSLT:

<Column Name=“Location” DisplayName=“Office” SortOrder=“Ascending” />
<Column Name=“Department” DisplayName=“Department” SortOrder=“Ascending” />

After clicking Apply, Ok and starting an incremental crawl none of the added facets appeared.

At a forum somewhere on the internet (don’t know where anymore) I learned that I had to make Managed Properties for the two facets. But before you can make these Managed Properties some documents have to be uploaded to the document libraries so the metadata with the location and department information can be crawled.

After an  incremental or full crawl the Managed Properties can be made and the facets will appear.

Tags: Best Practices, Faceted Search, guide, XSLT