As we are in the process of porting our FC.ImageSearch product to SharePoint 2010 we came across a couple of Properties that are inaccessible if the code is running in the context of a Content Application, e.g. the AllCategories property of the schema object (more details on that here).

 

To make a long story short: Microsoft has opted to block access to certain data in the object model in order to prevent administration work to be done from a content application (instead of utilizing the central administration web application).

 

While I agree that security is always a concern I think that the current implementation is too tight.

 

One Example: In our scenario we want to give the site administrator the information which columns of the site's lists are mapped by which Managed Property's, so that he/she then knows how to configure the Advanced Search page properties accordingly. However, that's not possible as the CrawledProperty's - the "link" between columns and ManagedProperty's - are inaccessible from the content application.

 

Again, I consider it right to prevent any modifications to be made to the search' objects from a content application, but why cut off read access?

 

To solve this we implemented a custom WCF service on the central administration web application which the content application's code can talk to. While that's not bad or difficult it still doesn't feel right.

 

What do you think?