For my current development, one of the requirements is to be able to make some search through the Moss API or web service, so after some search on the web I discovered a really nice tool.

The SharePoint Search Services Tool, which allow you to directly do your request on the web services.

That tool is really awesome!

Make a request on a web services consist on 4 steps:

Get the value and scope you want to search on, generate the "Query Packet", which is simply create an XML formatted to be understood by the web service, make the request to it (via Query or QueryEx method), get the answer.

With that tool you will be able to:

• Define your query text
• Define the sort method
• Choose the properties to define in the XML answer
• Query the Query or QueryEx methods
• See the results in XML or in datagrid view
• …

The request window:

The Links

Download the SharePoint Search Services Tool from Codeplex: http://www.codeplex.com/SharePointSearchServ

Visual How-To access to the SharePoint wseb services: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb625950.aspx

The QueryPacket element on MSDN: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms451565.aspx

To get the results of a search in XML format, for example, to see the properties that are returned, copy/paste the following code in the "Search Core Result" XSLT window.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0" xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform">
<xsl:output method="xml" version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" indent="yes"/>
<xsl:template match="/">
<xmp><xsl:copy-of select="*"/></xmp>
</xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>

Ok, that’s over blogged, but always useful