Getting Elevated Search Results in SharePoint 2010

I often use the SharePoint 2010 search CoreResultsWebPart in combination with scopes, content types and managed properties defined in the Search Service Application (SSA) for having dynamic search-driven content in pages. Sometimes the users might need to see some excerpt of content that they really do not have access to, and that you don't want to grant them access to either; e.g. to show a summary to anonymous visitors on your public web-site from selected content that is really stored in the extranet web-application in the SharePoint farm.

What is needed then is to execute the search query with elevated privileges using a custom core results web-part. As my colleague Mikael Svenson shows in Doing blended search results in SharePoint–Part 2: The Custom CoreResultsWebPart Way, it is quite easy to get at the search results code and use the SharedQueryManager object that actually runs the query. Create a web-part that inherits the ootb web-part and override the GetXPathNavigator method like this:

namespace Puzzlepart.SharePoint.Presentation

{

    [ToolboxItemAttribute(false)]

    public class JobPostingCoreResultsWebPart : CoreResultsWebPart

    {

        protected override void CreateChildControls()

        {

            base.CreateChildControls();

        }

        protected override XPathNavigator GetXPathNavigator(string viewPath)

        {

            XmlDocument xmlDocument = null;

            QueryManager queryManager = 

              SharedQueryManager.GetInstance(Page, QueryNumber)

                .QueryManager;

            SPSecurity.RunWithElevatedPrivileges(delegate()

            {

                xmlDocument = queryManager.GetResults(queryManager[0]);

            });

            XPathNavigator xPathNavigator = xmlDocument.CreateNavigator();

            return xPathNavigator;

        }

    }

}

Running the query with elevated privileges means that it can return any content that the app-pool identity has access to. Thus, it is important that you grant that account read permissions only on content that you would want just any user to see. Remember that the security trimming is done at query time, not at crawl time, with standard SP2010 server search. It is the credentials passed to the location's SSA proxy that is used for the security trimming. Use WindowsIdentity.GetCurrent() from the System.Security.Principal namespace if you need to get at the app-pool account from your code.

You would want to add a scope and/or some fixed keywords to the query in the code before getting the results, in order to prevent malicious or accidental misuse of the elevated web-part to search for just anything in the crawled content of the associated SSA that the app-pool identity has access to. Another alternative is to run the query under another identity than the app-pool account by using real Windows impersonation in combination with the Secure Store Service (see this post for all the needed code) as this allows for using a specific content query account.

The nice thing about using the built-in query manager this way, rather than running your own KeywordQuery and providing your own result XML local to the custom web-part instance, is that the shared QueryManager's Location object will get its Result XML document populated. This is important for the correct behavior for the other search web-parts on the page using the same QueryNumber / UserQuery, such as the paging and refiners web-parts.

The result XmlDocument will also be in the correct format with lower case column names, correct hit highlighting data, correct date formatting, duplicate trimming, getting <path> to be <url> and <urlEncoded>, have the correct additional managed and crawled properties in the result such as <FileExtension> and <ows_MetadataFacetInfo>, etc, in addition to having the row <id> element and <imageUrl> added to each result. If you override by using a replacement KeywordQuery you must also implement code to apply appended query, fixed query, scope, result properties, sorting and paging yourself to gain full fidelity for your custom query web-part configuration.

If you don't get the expected elevated result set in your farm (I've only tested this on STS claims based web-apps; also see ForceClaimACLs for the SSA by my colleague Ole Kristian Mørch-Storstein), then the sure thing is to create a new QueryManager instance within the RWEP block as shown in How to: Use the QueryManager class to query SharePoint 2010 Enterprise Search by Corey Roth. This will give you correctly formatted XML results, but note that the search web-parts might set the $ShowMessage xsl:param to true, tricking the XSLT rendering into show the "no results" message and advice texts. Just change the XSLT to call either dvt_1.body or dvt_1.empty templates based on the TotalResults count in the XML rather than the parameter. Use the <xmp> trick to validate that there are results in the XML that all the search web-parts consumes, including core results and refinement panel.

The formatting and layout of the search results is as usual controlled by overriding the result XSLT. This includes the data such as any links in the results, as you don't want the users to click on links that just will give them access denied errors.

When using the search box web-part, use the contextual scope option for the scopes dropdown with care. The ContextualScopeUrl (u=) parameter will default to the current web-application, causing an empty result set when using the custom core results web-part against a content source from another SharePoint web-application.