How to create a new result type in SharePoint Server 2013

copyright from: blogs.technet.com

This is a blog post in the series "How to change the way search results are displayed in SharePoint Server 2013." To demonstrate how you can customize your search results, I'll use examples from an internal Microsoft Search Center.

For an overview of the blog posts in this series, go to How to change the way search results are displayed in SharePoint Server 2013.

In the previous blog post, I explained how item display templates and hit highlighting work. In this blog post we'll learn:

• About the Search Center example in this series  
• How to copy a default item display template
• How to create a result type

  

About the Search Center example in this series

To help explain how you can customize the way search results are displayed, I’ll use examples from a tool that I use on a daily basis: an internal list of Microsoft publications.

As you know, Microsoft publishes thousands of articles across TechNet, MSDN and office.com. To assist in the publishing process, we use several SharePoint lists. Each item in a list represents an article or a media file. To make it easy to find information about a particular list item, we created a Search Center that searches across these lists.

In our first version of the Search Center, all the search results were displayed identically. This was because by default, all list items belonged to the same SharePoint List Item result type. We wanted to change this so that just by glancing at the search results, we could distinguish between an article published on TechNet and an article published on MSDN. We also wanted to add important information about each search result that would be visible without having to select and open it.

Before we did anything in SharePoint, we sat down for a planning session. The first step was to decide how we wanted to categorize our search results. We came up with the following categories:

Category	Definition
TechNet content	Articles that have been published on the TechNet platform
MSDN content	Articles that have been published on the MSDN platform
Office.com content	Articles that have been published on the office.com platform
Images content	Images that are used in publications
Video content	Videos that are used in publications
Download content	Downloadable content

Once we had defined the categories, we then needed to distinguish the categories from each other. Items in our list contain a site column named Distribution Channel. This site column contains the value of the platform to which an article has been published, for example TechNet Library.

We decided that we would use values from the Distribution Channel site column to distinguish the categories from each other.

With these decisions in hand, I set out to create new result types for each of the categories. The procedure for creating a new result type is identical for all categories, so to save space, I will only show you how I created the TechNet content result type.

How to copy a default item display template

Before you create a new result type, you should create a new item display template that your new result type will use.  To avoid having to create a new item display template from scratch, you can copy an existing one. Try to copy an item display template that is as close as possible to the type of content you have.  Here's what you should do:

1. Copy a default item display template.

In my scenario, I wanted to customize search results for SharePoint list items. From this reference table I was able to determine that the default item display template that is used by the SharePoint List Itemresult type is the file named Item_Default.  Because I had mapped my network drive, I could easily copy the Item_Default file in Windows Explorer.

By refreshing Windows Explorer, I could see that SharePoint had automatically created an associated JavaScript file.

2. Rename your newly created item display template.

In my scenario, I renamed it TechNet content. Again, I refreshed Windows Explorer to verify that the JavaScript file was updated accordingly. 

3. Open the new display template and change the