I am going to keep today’s post short and sweet, covering a quick change I needed to make to my SharePoint Online Indexer (still in preview but we’re using it for our custom chat bots) to make the index of a SharePoint library return the true URL of the source document so that we can feed that back to users so they can validate the chat bot answers.
It took me longer than I would like to admit to figure out how to do this, even though the metadata item is listed in the one and only Microsoft document for this tool, because I was wanting to return the URL and the documentation only mentioned URI and didn’t explain what they meant by that and gave no examples of it being used.
This index is specifically used for custom chat bots created through Azure AI Foundry, and not for those created with other AI or cognitive services within Azure. I saw a lot of documentation and forum posts about those versions of indexers, but didn’t see anything covering this topic specifically which is why I wanted to write this post.
What’s in this post
Adding SharePoint document URL to index results
For creating my Azure Search data sources, indexes, and indexers, I have used Postman to run the API calls needed to hit the SharePoint Online (SPO) indexer service, since that is the only way to create this type of indexer (can’t use the Azure portal wizard).
It is very simple to return the document URL in your index, you only need to add this line to your index, and then rename it/map it in the indexer definition if you want. I didn’t not want to rename it, so I only changed the index definition.
{ "name": "metadata_spo_item_weburi", "type": "Edm.String", "key": false, "searchable": false, "filterable": false, "sortable": false, "facetable": false },Once you add that to your index definition, make sure to send the API request through again, then reset and run the indexer related to the index. At that point, you should be able to query your index through the console and see that URL included in the results of the index.
Summary
If you are using the SharePoint Online Indexer for Azure AI Search (with Azure AI Foundry) and you would like to return the full URL of a source document for a chat bot response, you can do so by adding the “metadata_spo_item_weburi” metadata field to your index definition.
