Condition relationships

When you have more than one condition in a search, you must decide if all conditions must be met (AND) or only one of them needs to be met (OR) for a document to qualify. You can also build more complex conditions by nesting groups of conditions. For example, you can indicate that conditions A and (B or C) must be true. Thus, a document would qualify if A and B are true. A document would also qualify if A and C are true. If A is not true, the document would not qualify.

You can specify AND or OR for two or more contiguous rows. Thus, rows must be arranged so that you can group them appropriately. In the previous example, rows B and C must be contiguous so they can be grouped by OR. Row A can be above or below the OR grouping.

Specifying condition relationships

By default, all conditions are initially linked by AND. If you find that you use OR most of the time, you can change the default to OR in the Search Designer options. This change lasts only for the current session.

To specify AND or OR within a grid

  1. Highlight two or more contiguous conditions in a grid by first clicking on a row. Then hold down the Shift key and click the last row of the group.
  2. Click the And or Or button. This displays a colored bar at the right to indicate which conditions are joined by that choice.

To rearrange conditions

If your requirements change after you’ve entered the rows, you can move one or more rows from one position to another position.

  1. Select the row you want to move and cut it (click Edit > Cut or the standard key command for your platform).
  2. Select the row that is below the position where you want the cut row to appear and open up a blank row above it by clicking the Insert a Row icon. (Click the empty area at the bottom of the grid to add a new row at the bottom.)
  3. Paste the row (click Edit > Paste or the standard key command for your platform). The pasted row will appear above this selected row.

Using the previous example, if you wanted to link Content Size and Creator with OR and link those to Date Created with AND, you would need to cut Content Size. Then you would highlight the Date Created row, click the Insert a Row icon, and paste into the blank row. You would also need to re-specify the AND and OR operators.