We have a heavily customised SharePoint publishing (WCM) site that uses no web parts in order to meet with XHTML and (AA) accessibilty guidelines. The trouble is that the search functionality is not generating any usage statistics (Usage reports within Search Administration in the SSP). We know this is down to our customisations because we have a couple of the OOTB team sites in the farm which are generating search statistics. We are not sure where/how we need to fix this. It seems we may need to wire up a call to the search.asmx web service but I'm not sure. Perhaps we need to call something from within the SharePoint API as part of our call to the search service? I'm not sure.
Has anyone out there built a heavily customised SharePoint site (no web parts) and are logging search statistics, can you comment on how you did it? Or can anyoone provide insight into how the staistics are generated?
If it helps we are running a medium sized farm with 2 WFEs, 1 Index server and 1 SQL Server box. All Windows 2003 R2 SP2, 32-Bit. MOSS 2007 SP1 (plus December CU) Enterprise Edition.
Thanks, James.
P.S. this question was previously asked on Stack Overflow (https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1432182/how-do-sharepoint-search-statistics-get-generated) but some commenters recommended it should be moved here.
Best Answer
This might not be the answer you want to hear but our workaround was to place the search control webparts (just searchboxex needed I think) in one of the hidden content place holders (in our case ContentPlaceHolderId = PlaceHolderSearchArea)