First the good news: the product is finally out and I am really happy about the results we've come up with. The new version of the FC.ImageSearch product is a great tool because it simplifies setting up an Image Search in SharePoint so that even mere mortals (non-programmers) can manage and configure everything.
Now the not so good news: this was way too hard to develop. To start with, we had to recognize that we had to rewrite the whole application, as Microsoft's changes to the SharePoint security (in general btw a good move) locked up way too many things that aren't critical or even sensitive as I see it. E.g. no longer can we offer the information whether a column in a library is indexed and under which ManagedProperty to the Site Administrator, as access to many of the SharePoint Search objects is now only available from the Central Administration web application.
So much for the rant. On to the good stuff.
Several things also got better. In SharePoint 2010 we can now much better filter out the Image Search requests for specific libraries (which are selected by the Site Administrator). And the whole Search Service Application architecture is really nice too to work with also!
Enough talk. Let pictures speak!
Of course, all the links are there to get to the Preview, the item's properties and the exact folder of the library the image is in.
What I am personally really happy about is that this time around we were able to get rid of the separate Xsl document that held the definition of the layout of the search results. This was possible because we finally got to implement a bit of Reflection to be able to set the Xsl property of the CoreResults web part (I blogged about it in my previous post).
Oh well, I've done it again ...ended on another oddity of Microsoft implementation choices. But i think you'd agree with me ....why would you not allow to set a property (if not THE most important property) of a web part?
Anyway, being able to set the Xsl property means that it's now much easier for anyone to modify the Xsl code. So, if you really want to, you can simply bring up the web part editor and do it. Yet again, I think that most people will be absolutely happy using the configuration user interface of the FC.ImageSearch.