I am spiffing up my search demo for my talks at the SharePoint Best Practices Conference in La Jolla and London (and Connections in Orlando) and wanted to add a few additional sort options to the FAST Search Center in my environment like Author and Size. When I set up the environment I was careful to follow the excellent installation and configuration guide on TechNet. Yet, when I tried to configure the Search Actions Links web part in the search center it only showed two properties.

I reviewed my configuration and checked that there were properties with the SortableType set to SortableEnabled and there were. Though I noticed that Author was not, so I added it.

Set-FASTSearchMetadataManagedProperty -Name Author -SortableType 1

I reviewed the list again and all was right with the world.

Get-FASTSearchMetadataManagedProperty | where {$_.SortableType -eq 1} | ft Name, SortableType

Yet, still no joy in the Search Center. Bing-ing around I found this post by RDA (Steve) that suggested that my Web application  pool account was not a member of the FAST Search Administrators group. Though I was not seeing the errors in the ULS logs, this was the cause of the issue. I added the Service Account to the FAST Search Administrators group in AD and returned to the Search Center (after a reboot, just to be sure).

Save and publish and I am happy!