MOSS 2007 People Search

Written by Oz Warren Friday, 11 June 2010 14:21

I was recently having problems with a people search on a SharePoint intranet. The search site that I'd set up was randomly returning an error:

System.NullReferenceException: Object reference not set to an instance of an object. at System.Xml.XmlNode.RemoveChild(XmlNode oldChild) at Microsoft.Office.Server.Search.WebControls.PeopleCoreResultsWebPart.DeleteElementAddToMyColleaguesURL(XmlNode result) at Microsoft.Office.Server.Search.WebControls.PeopleCoreResultsWebPart.CreateXmlDocument() at Microsoft.Office.Server.Search.WebControls.PeopleCoreResultsWebPart.SortBySocialDistance() at Microsoft.Office.Server.Search.WebControls.PeopleCoreResultsWebPart.GetXPathNavigator(String viewPath)

It was occurring between different user accounts with similar permissions as well, which is strange as it apparently indicates that records have missing accountname data and that is causing SharePoint to throw a wobbly.

Anyway, after a little Googling I found a couple of articles that pointed towards amending the search scope to add a new property query rule to limit the results to records that definitely, absolutely are people records. The rule that worked for me was:

contentclass = urn:content-class:SPSPeople

Once the scope was updated and the updated scoped added to the people search core results web part in the results page, this seemed to clear the problem.