This may be obvious to many, but while studying for my MOSS programming exam, I learned that it’s pretty easy to get the actual XML from a search query via the user interface.

One quick method is as follows:

• Access advanced search.
• Perform a search that returns some data.
• Edit the page (via site settings).
• Change the XSL to the following:

<?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="/">
    <pre>
      <xsl:copy-of select="*"/>
    </pre>
  </xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>

• Hit apply.
• View Source in the browser.

Note that the <pre> tag doesn’t do much except serve as a convenient marker when you view the results. 

This trick can be very helpful when working with managed properties and customizing search.  It will provide a definitive list of the XML available for you to use in your xslt which would have been very helpful the last 25 times I created some customized search results.

This ought to work for dataviews as well, though I have not tested that out as yet.