The problem

With the introduction of the October Cumulative Update for SharePoint 2007 I encountered a problem with the search box on multilingual sites. After the installation of the update the scopes dropdown list always uses the same scope display group. After investigation I found that the language of the root web is used to determine the scope display group.

The cause

This behavior was not present in the control prior to the October update, in the description of the update (KB975731) we found:

"All sites," "People," and "This site" search scopes are available only for English language sites. Sites that are written in other languages show only the "This site" search scope.

This explains that the control has been changed in this update.

The reason

Before the October Update the property ScopeDisplayGroupName is set in the constructor of the SearchBoxEx control:

this._ScopeDisplayGroupName =
    SearchCommon.GetLocResourceString(
        LocStringId.ScopeDisplayGroup_SearchDropdown_Name);

In the October Update this line of code has been changed to:

this._ScopeDisplayGroupName = GetScopeDisplayGroupNameDefaultValue();

This function uses the language from the root web is to determine the value for the ScopeDisplayGroupName property:

private static string GetScopeDisplayGroupNameDefaultValue()
{
    if (SPContext.Current != null)
    {
        while (SPContext.Current.Site != null)
        {
            CultureInfo siteCollectionCulture = null;
            SPSecurity.RunWithElevatedPrivileges(delegate {
                siteCollectionCulture = new CultureInfo(
                    (int) SPContext.Current.Site.RootWeb.Language);
            });
            return StringResourceManager.GetString(
                LocStringId.ScopeDisplayGroup_SearchDropdown_Name,
                    siteCollectionCulture);
        }
    }

    return SearchCommon.GetLocResourceString(
            LocStringId.ScopeDisplayGroup_SearchDropdown_Name);
}

The solution

For this website I want the value for the ScopeDisplayGroupName property to be based on the culture of the current web. To re-enable this functionality we updated our custom master page and added the following to the SearchBoxEx control:

<sharepoint:searchboxex runat="server" ...
 ScopeDisplayGroupName="<%$Resources:searchfix,ScopeDisplayGroup_SearchDropdown_Name%>" />

In the App_GlobalResources I added custom resource files with the correct translations for the resource key ScopeDisplayGroup_SearchDropdown_Name.

A external company made a design for a Internet facing website, in the design the search control was made up in to rows. So my first idea was to create a new controltemplate for the SmallSearchInputBox, but then I realized that in moss the search-control isn’t a controltemplate anymore (in WSS it is). The searchbox in MOSS is a control called SearchBoxEx, and this has some properties for the layout of the control. But is always renders the output as a table with 1 row, so my problem was how to render is in 2 rows using divs. Google didn’t provide me with an answer, so is started coding myself (I don’t want to create a new control with all logic, I just want reuse all the logic of SearchBoxEx and provide new render logic).

I finally found a way to do this, I just create an new control that inherits from SearchBoxEx. My custom look-and-feel can be done used an override of the CreateChildControls:

protected override void CreateChildControls( )
{
    base.CreateChildControls( );

    if ( Controls.Count < 2 )
    {
        return;
    }

    HyperLinkLoc hlink = null;
    if ( Controls[ 1 ].GetType( ) == typeof ( Table ) )
    {
        Table tabel = ( Table ) Controls[ 1 ];

        // Loop through cells to find the go button
        foreach ( TableCell cell in tabel.Rows[ 0 ].Cells )
        {
            if ( cell.Controls.Count > 0 )
            {
                if ( cell.Controls[ 0 ].GetType( ) == typeof ( HyperLinkLoc ) )
                {
                    hlink = ( HyperLinkLoc ) cell.Controls[ 0 ];
                }
            }
        }
        tabel.Visible = false;

I first call the base.CreateChildControls to have SearchBoxEx create all the controls based on the properties set. Then I start looping through the tablecells to find the Go-button, the other controls (textbox & dropdownlist) are available as protected members. After the go-button has been found, I set the table to invisible. Now that I have a reference to the controls I can start building my own look-and-feel:

        if ( m_searchKeyWordTextBox != null )
        {
            HtmlGenericControl div = new HtmlGenericControl( "div" );
            div.Attributes.Add( "class", "ms-sbcell" );
            m_searchKeyWordTextBox.Style.Clear( ); // remove the width style, done in css
            div.Controls.Add( m_searchKeyWordTextBox );
            Controls.Add( div );
        }

        if ( hlink != null )
        {
            HtmlGenericControl div3 = new HtmlGenericControl( "div" );
            div3.Attributes.Add( "class", "ms-sbgo ms-sbcell" );
            div3.Controls.Add( hlink );
            Controls.Add( div3 );
        }

        if ( m_ddlScopes != null )
        {
            HtmlGenericControl div2 = new HtmlGenericControl( "div" );
            div2.Attributes.Add( "class", "ms-sbscopes ms-sbcell" );
            div2.Controls.Add( m_ddlScopes );
            Controls.Add( div2 );
        }
    }
}

Download source: searchbox