What are the rules for how the Search field operates in the Library View?

[BartRhoten]

Hi all, we see the Search field in the Library View acting oddly. Are there any rules that are documented anywhere for "what is a valid search term or phrase"?

For example: The Search field in the Library view will not find the keyphrases "do not buy" or "do not sell" unless the end user puts them in quotation marks. That's not how they are typed in the Keywords field on the documents we hope to find via Search. There are many other keyphrases that are entered in the Keywords fields for various documents, and they do not require the user to type them in quotation marks to work. What makes those two phrases (do not buy, do not sell) different than the rest?

Also, the Search field will not find a Document Title like FMBB - Budgeting Workbench (Create a Budget) . The parentheses in the Title make the Search not return any results. You have to leave off anything in parentheses to make the document appear in the results. If you type FMBB - Budgeting Workbench and Search on that, it will display results.

Thanks for your advice!

[susan_niceley]

There is a known issue with the Keyword search in the latest release 2211. It will be fixed in the 2211 HotFix release this month.

[BartRhoten]

Thanks Susan! You're right, 2211 Cloud behaves this way with "do not buy" and "do not sell". It doesn't seem to mind the parentheses in the Document Title though. I found these two issues in 2206 On-Premise. Are you aware of any documentation for the Search field's logic (how it thinks, any forbidden characters or spacing we're not supposed to use in Search)?

[susan_niceley]

Hi Bart,

I only know what I've learned from testing when I get a customer issue. It's documented on a simple level, (this is the ui, this is the button), but the logic behind the search is not documented in detail. Some of the settings in Playback Settings -> Library are relevant and when selected give a more detailed description in yellow below - like Window Handler -> Allow Search in bookpages; Visual Properties -> Start with Search Item, Glossary -> Glossary Group

[BartRhoten]

Thanks Susan, that helps - at least we know there's not some Bible that will tell us how the Search field thinks in the Library view. We did some testing with the help of Derek Hill, our SAP project manager who has a background in reporting. He found that the "do not buy" (without quotes) search phrase is interpreted as “find documents that contain “do” but do NOT contain “buy”. You get results, but not the document with “do not buy” (since it contains the text “buy"). You only get documents that contain “do”. He also found that the forward slash ( / ) can be used as a control character to tell the Search feature to ignore the command word "not" and treat it like text. So the search phrase "do /not buy" finds documents with any of the words “do”, “not”, or “buy”. He thinks this harks back to the olden days of when SEN Manager ran on SQL only, because that's a SQL-ish kind of command language.

Shane Lipke of SAP added that the Search field normally:

• adds the operator OR between each word you type in the Search field, so it should look for Do OR Not OR Buy. [except that we saw Not being interpreted as an operator - ed.]
• If you enter a phrase in quotation marks (double quotes, like " ), then the Search field looks for that exact phrase.

Some examples of special characters that you should not use in a Search string are the percent symbol (%) which is used as a wildcard, and open or close parentheses symbols such ( or ) , because those have special meaning in SQL.