SharePoint Online How To Search and Display Custom Metadata

Handling custom columns in search in Office 365 / SharePoint Online isn’t the easiest of processes and there are a number of things that can easily throw you.

The net result will be one of three things:

1. Site columns not displayed in custom display templates.
2. Site Columns not refinable.
3. Site columns not searchable.

These three symptoms are all loosely related and stem from not setting up your search schema and result types correctly.

Search has many moving parts in it and to make matters worse the options available differ between SharePoint Online and SharePoint On Premise.

I’ll look at the three issues in more depth before moving onto how to configure a column so it is displayed, refinable and searchable.