SharePoint 2010 : Configuring Search Settings and the User Interface - Search Tabs and Pages

Search tabs are a web control displayed on the Enterprise Search Center. The purpose of search tabs is to allow easy navigation between different search pages, each with their own search Web Parts, layout, configuration, and scope. Per default SharePoint creates the All Sites and the People tabs in Enterprise Search Centers, as shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1. Search tabs

The tabs themselves are list items. Separate lists exist for the following:

• Tabs shown on the search pages
• Tabs shown on the results pages

The benefit of search tabs being list items is that it makes all search pages share the same tabs, without affecting the tabs defined for the results pages and vice versa. This way the search pages for All Sites, People, and any other search page share tabs. Similarly the results pages for All Sites, People, and any other results page share tabs.

To add or edit existing tabs, select the Page tab from the ribbon and click Edit to put the page in Edit mode (Figure 2). As mentioned before, the tabs editor is not a Web Part but a web control. On the search dialog pages (and also on the results pages), this control is displayed at the top of the page. The location can be changed by editing the page's markup.

Figure 2. Search tabs edit control on page in Edit mode

To view, add, or edit existing tabs, click the Edit Tabs link, which opens the list of existing tabs. The list shows the default tabs for an Enterprise Search Center. Adding, editing, and removing tabs is just like managing items in any other list.

On the search pages, three tabs are created per default, but only two tabs are visible on the Search dialog page (Figure 3). The two tabs with the tab name All Sites are actually pointing to different pages. The first one is pointing to default.aspx, which is the search page normally viewed. The second one points to advanced.aspx, which is the page for advanced search. The final tab points to people. On results pages, only two tabs are created per default.

Figure 3. Search tabs list

For new tabs to be meaningful, a new search page or results page should be created. To create a new search page, do the following:

1. Go to an existing search page.
2. Click Site Actions => More Options to open the list of page types. The filters in the left menu are useful for quickly finding or trimming down the options to choose from.
3. Using the page filter (Figure 4), three options are displayed, as shown here. Depending on whether publishing is desired, choose the correct page type and click the Create button.
   

   Figure 4. Creating a publishing page

After choosing a page type and clicking the Create button, the Create Page dialog opens (Figure 5). Here it is possible to apply some standard information to the new page. The title will be displayed at the top of the page as well as in the title bar of most browsers. The description is displayed just below the title in smaller letters and gives users more detailed information on the intent and usage of the page.

The URL Name specifies the file name of the page. The page is created in a location relative to the site on which it exists. The pages will always be of type *.aspx. It is not possible to create other formats of web pages using this dialog.

The Page Layout section displays the available pre-defined layouts for the given site. If the new page to be created is a search page, choose “Search box” or “Advanced search” from the Page Layout section. If the new page to be created is a results page, choose “Search results” or “People search results” from the Page Layout section.

Figure 5. Choosing a page layout of new page

Choose the desired page layout, and click the Create button. The new page will open in Edit mode, as shown in Figure 6. For Enterprise Search Centers, this page also include the Tabs web control. Notice that the newly created page is not mapped to a specific tab. This can be done from any of the search pages or search results pages in Edit mode, depending on the target tab group for the new page.

Figure 6. New search page in Edit mode

To add the new search page to the search tabs list, click Add New Tab. This is equal to going to the search tabs list and adding a new item. On the new tab item (Figure 7), give the tab a meaningful name and tooltip. The next step is to map the page itself to the new tab. To do this, copy the URL of the newly created page into the Page section.

Figure 7. Linking new tab to a page

When the tab name, tooltip, and URL of the target page are entered, click the Save button. A new search tab is now available for the new custom search page and all other pages sharing the same tabs list, as shown in Figure 8.

Figure 8. Search dialog with custom tab

Results pages and tabs in results pages are created the same way. Creating new tabs is an option to do more complex search configurations and make them easily accessible to users. In some scenarios, it might be that two tabs differ on the scope they use only when searching. Some of the search settings, such as scopes, are also possible to do on just one page by including a scope selector control, but enabling this as a tab instead of a scope selector is sometimes preferred. It does introduce some maintenance overhead when adding new search pages and search results pages, but it also provides the benefit of being able to fine-tune each page to meet specific demands.