Sharepoint Federated Search Webpart Is Blank when Searching

Symptoms

When performing a search, the webpart responsible for showing Confluence search results is blank and does not show any messages, errors or otherwise. There are no errors in the logs.

Causes

There are two known causes for this issue:

1. The Federated Search Webpart configuration will not be inherited by a site collection from the top level site.
2. The username and password provided when configuring the webpart is not a Confluence Administrator.
3. The Confluence OpenSearch URL in the SharePoint Federated Search configuration ("Query Template") is wrong. 

Resolution

1. The webpart must be configured for each site that uses the webpart for federated search in that site's settings console. This issue is tracked by CSI-144.
2. The login used in the webpart configuration must be a Confluence Administrator in order to successfully authenticate into Confluence during the search. This will not grant visibility to pages that the user initiating the search isn't supposed to see. Their login will be impersonated by the webpart after initial authentication as an admin and the results will be trimmed.

3. Make sure that the URL specified can be run in Confluence side by hitting it directly. For example, if the URL in the config looks like this:

   http://my-confluence/plugins/servlet/opensearch/1.0?query={searchTerms}&format=rss_1.0&os_authType=basic

   Try to access this URL (by replacing the {searchTerms} with the search keyword accordingly) in the browser and see if you could get RSS result as a response, otherwise, that means the URL is incorrect and needs to be fixed:

   http://my-confluence/plugins/servlet/opensearch/1.0?query=foobar&format=rss_1.0&os_authType=basic

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