The other day, I very lazily, used SharePoint Designer to add a few items to the property bag. Soon as I done it, someone then said they wanted to search upon the values inside the property bag. Unfortunately this isn’t something that can be done via SharePoint Designer. After spending 5 minutes or so searching online for a pre-made PowerShell code, I could only find the solution for On-Prem.

The only piece of code I found to do this to SharePoint Online was through the Office Developer PNP CSOM code. I really didn’t want to create a Visual Studio project just to use the PNP Core. (See http://dev.office.com/patterns-and-practices for more information Office Dev PNP, there is so much information and cool videos there, there really is no need to re-hash anything in my own blog.) So I decided to just create PowerShell script which is pretty close to being like for like copy of the PNP Core method:

Web.AddIndexedPropertyBagKey(this Web web, string key)

Before I go into the code, I will explain how SharePoint knows which property bag items need to be indexed for search. Just by adding the item doesn’t make it visible to search, it has to be added to another property bag item called “vti_indexedpropertykeys“. The value of this property bag item is a pipe delimited Base64String. (Example: RABhAHUAZwBoAHQAZQByAA==|UwBvAG4A|cwBvAG4A| ). As you can see, it’s not just as simple as adding the string name to the vti_indexedpropertykeys value.

To encode a single value in PowerShell the following line of code works:

[System.Convert]::ToBase64String([System.Text.Encoding]::Unicode.GetBytes($value))

To decode a single value from Base64String to text the following PowerShell code works:

[System.Text.Encoding]::Unicode.GetString([System.Convert]::FromBase64String($EncodedValue))

The below code will ask you for the Web Url, your username, password (Secure string), propertybag key name and value. The code will first add or update the value in the property bag, and if it hasn’t been added to the index it will add it.

[System.Reflection.Assembly]::LoadWithPartialName("Microsoft.SharePoint.Client") | Out-Null
[System.Reflection.Assembly]::LoadWithPartialName("Microsoft.SharePoint.Client.Runtime")| Out-Null
$indexPropertyKeyConst = "vti_indexedpropertykeys"

function GetIndexedPropertyBagKeys($ctx)
{
  $results = @()
  $web = $ctx.Web;
  $ctx.Load($web.AllProperties)

  try
  {
  $ctx.ExecuteQuery();
  }
  catch{
   Write-host "Error accessing property bag " $_.Exception.Message -ForegroundColor Red
   exit 1
  }

  $indexPropertyBase64 = $web.AllProperties[$indexPropertyKeyConst];
  $separator = "|"
  $option = [System.StringSplitOptions]::RemoveEmptyEntries

  if(![string]::IsNullOrEmpty($indexPropertyBase64))
  {
    $resultsBase64 = $indexPropertyBase64.Split($separator, $option)

    foreach($r in $resultsBase64)
    {
     $results += [System.Text.Encoding]::Unicode.GetString([System.Convert]::FromBase64String($r))
    }
  }
    #comma not a mistake, required to ensure correct type is returned on empty or single array value.
    return ,$results
}

function GetEncodedValueForSearchIndexProperty($keysArray)
{
  $encode64Keys = [String]::Empty
  foreach($key in $keysArray)
  {
   $encode64Keys += [System.Convert]::ToBase64String([System.Text.Encoding]::Unicode.GetBytes($key))
   $encode64Keys += "|"
  }

  return $encode64Keys;
}

function AddIndexedPropertyBagKey($ctx, $propertyKey)
{
  [bool]$result = $false;
  [bool]$addValue = $false;
  $keys = GetIndexedPropertyBagKeys($ctx)

  if($keys -cnotcontains $propertyKey)
  {
     $addValue = $true;
  }

 if($addValue)
 {
   try
   {
   $keys += $propertyKey
   $keysBase64String = GetEncodedValueForSearchIndexProperty($keys)
   $ctx.Web.AllProperties[$indexPropertyKeyConst] = $keysBase64String
   $ctx.Web.Update()
   $ctx.ExecuteQuery()
   $result = $true
   }
   catch
   {
    Write-host "Error adding $propertyKey to index. " $_.Exception.Message -ForegroundColor Red
    exit 1
   }
 }

  return $result
}

function CreateUpdatePropertyBag($ctx, $propertyKey, $propValue)
{
  $web = $ctx.Web;
  $ctx.Load($web.AllProperties)
  try
  {
    $ctx.ExecuteQuery();
    $web.AllProperties[$propertyKey] = $propValue;
    $web.Update();
    $ctx.ExecuteQuery();
  }
  catch{
   Write-host "Error adding $propertyKey to property bag " $_.Exception.Message -ForegroundColor Red
   exit 1
  }
}

$webUrl = Read-Host -Prompt "Enter the WebUrl"
$username = Read-Host -Prompt "Enter your Email login"
$password = Read-Host -Prompt "Password for $username" -AsSecureString
$propKeyToIndex = Read-Host -Prompt "Enter the property key name to index"
$propValue = Read-Host -Prompt "Enter the $propKeyToIndex value"

$ctx = New-Object Microsoft.SharePoint.Client.ClientContext($webUrl)
$ctx.Credentials = New-Object Microsoft.SharePoint.Client.SharePointOnlineCredentials($username, $password)

CreateUpdatePropertyBag $ctx $propKeyToIndex $propValue;
AddIndexedPropertyBagKey $ctx $propKeyToIndex;

Write-Host "Complete" -ForegroundColor Green

You can download the source code directly from my OneDrive.

Thank you to my colleague Paul Perry with his help around PowerShell arrays.