Work with Simple Search
Simple search is the default search when you first open your search page. It provides a quick way to create a personal search to find various types of objects and it works with your user preferences settings. The user preferences for Search define the default search criteria used in the Search page and determine how the search results are displayed.
For example, the user preferences determine the type of object to search for, the object store to search, filtering by version status and object class, and which properties are available to search on initially in the Search page. You enter the property values and content values to search for in the Search page, and you can change the object type or object store, if needed.
You can quickly access the User Preferences Simple Search page by clicking Modify near the bottom of the Search page. After you click Accept to save your changes to the user preferences and click Exit, you return to the Search page. For more information on setting the user preferences, see User Preferences - Search.
If you want to access search templates, click Use Search Template from simple search.
Specify object store to search
You can change the object store in which you want to search at any time. Click Change Search In and another page appears displaying object stores arranged in a tree view structure, where you locate another object store in which you want to search.
In addition, you can also set a default search view for a specific object store. The default you specify overrides the Default Search View user preference and becomes the new default search view for a specific object store. First select the object store by using the Change Search In link and then click Set as Default Search In to set that object store as the default.
Check boxes
The check boxes at the bottom of the page are determined by your administrator. They have been designed to make it easier to search for common search criteria. Instead of setting up custom search criteria such as "Added By =" in your user preferences and then selecting your user name on the simple search page, you can just select the "Created by me" check box.
Search criteria
The search criteria initially display the settings you selected in the User Preferences Search view. The settings provide an overall criteria to which all of your searches adhere. You can use the default values from the user preferences or you can change them.
The following sections discuss the search settings and options you can use and need to consider when entering your search criteria.
NOTE The list of available properties and search criteria is always determined by the type of object selected and the user preferences search settings for that object type.
Properties and search operators
You cannot group the properties or change the order in which properties are evaluated from the simple search page. If you need to reorder the properties, change the order in the User Preferences Search view. The search operators must also be configured in your user preferences.
Search operators
The contains operator can be used for wildcard values. It replaces the Like operator. Other operators do not recognize the wildcard characters.
The starts with and ends with operators can include any number of characters, including zero characters. These two operators replace using the percent sign (%) before or after a character. Previously you used A% to find values that started with A. Now you use the Starts With operator.
Property criteria settings
The Search page displays up to five properties to define your search criteria, and you can enter values for any of the available properties. You can also leave the property values blank and search only on the contents of your documents. The available properties are determined by your user preference settings for the selected object type.
NOTE
- You can also search on single-value object-valued property types.
- If a property has a pre-assigned list of possible values (a choice list), you can select values from a drop-down list. You cannot type a value for a property that uses a choice list.
The search evaluates the property values in the order listed, one row at a time, and any property without a value is skipped. If you entered three or more properties, all the properties that are ANDed are then evaluated first as a group. If an OR is used between two ANDed property groups, the results from the first ANDed group of properties are added to the second ANDed group of properties. For example, a search consisting of property A and property B or property C and property D is evaluated by first getting the results of property A and property B and then adding the results from evaluating property C and property D.
After the property values are evaluated, the search options and content value are checked.
Search options
To further customize your search, search options might also be available at the bottom of the page. Your administrator defines and determines the options that are displayed. For example, select one or more options to narrow your search down to PDF documents that were added within the last week by checking the "Added in the last week" and "PDF documents" check boxes.
Content settings
If you enable the "Show Content Contains" preference (set it to Show), then you can enter the text you want to search for in documents. Your administrator must have search indexing enabled for the object store to search for document contents. Note that there can be a delay between the time a document is added to an object store and the time that the system updates the search indexes.
NOTE < and > are not supported in content searches. They are keywords in Verity and will cause a Verity error message to be displayed when searching for these characters. Consider using the In Zone modifier which searches for HTML and XML tags and typically consist of these characters, such as <name>.
When you enter a word, the search looks for all forms of the word. For example,
entering month
would return documents that contain month, months,
and monthly. Entering work
would find documents containing work,
works, worked, working, and worksheet.
When you enter more than one word, all of the words must be found in the document.
For example, if you enter monthly report,
only documents that contain
both monthly and report are returned.
To search for a phrase with words in a specific order, put the phrase in quotes.
For example, "right whale"
would return only documents
containing the phrase right whale. Documents that contain right and whale, but
not next to each other, would be ignored.
You can also use quotes to search for specific capitalization or spelling.
For example, "star"
would find star, but not starship
or Star.
Content value wildcards
Use an asterisk (*
) to stand for zero or more letters, numbers,
or underscore ( _ ) characters. For example, wo*d
would find wooden,
word, World, wordsmith, and would. Use a (?
) to stand for one (and only one) alphanumeric characters as in ?an
, which returns ran, pan,
can, ban.
Search results
In addition to effects of the property and content criteria settings, the search results returned depend on the user preferences settings for Search Scope and Range. These settings, found on the General Search page under Content Contains Settings, are used to determine how close multiple words in document content must be to each other to be a match for the content criteria. The default setting is to locate words that appear Near each other, within 1000 words.
When Relevancy Ranking is turned On, the search results are sorted with the document with the most matching words listed first. When Relevancy Ranking is turned Off, the results are not sorted.
Max Results determines the maximum number of results to display at one time. Setting this to a large number can slow down the search process.
NOTE You cannot access Relevancy Ranking, Search Scope and Range settings from the Modify button in the Search page. You must click the Preferences link at the top right of the Search page and navigate to the General view of the Search settings in User Preferences to change the settings. You can change the settings for Max Results from the Search Template page.
Your search results are displayed in an Items Found list. Use the View and Show Items drop-down menus to change the way your results are displayed. The View menu determines if your results are displayed in Detailed or Magazine view. The Show Items menu determines the number of items displayed on the page.
Use the Actions Menu to view a list of available actions to perform on selected items.
To set up and run Simple Search
- Click Search from the list of views. If you see Use Simple Search, click it.
- Check the Search In criteria at the top of the page to be sure you are searching in the appropriate location. If not, click Change Search In to set the appropriate object store. You can also limit the search to a folder in that object store.
- If you want to change the object for which you are searching, click the Search for drop-down list and select an object type. The property criteria changes to reflect your selection. The default is to search for documents and not show this list. To display this list, go to User Preferences, Search View, General page, and select Show from the Show Search For list.)
- If you select Document for the object type, select the Version
Option, if it's available. You might need to click the Modify button to set the version option.
- Released Version returns only documents that are major versions. There can be more recent minor versions of the document, but these are not returned.
- Current Version returns the most recent version of the document.
- All Versions returns both released and current versions of the document.
NOTE If you specify a folder-level search, the Filed Version option will always be used. Filed Version is the version of the document when it was originally filed in the folder you are searching.
- If the available properties are acceptable, enter the values for which to search.
- If the property contains a user or group value, a default value can be displayed.
- To select a different user, click Select
User.
- Type one or more characters for the beginning of the names to search.
For example, to locate users named aalberto and amoss, type
a
. All user names beginning with "a" are returned. You can narrow the search by entering more characters. For example,aal
would return aalberto and aallen, but not alemon or amoss. - Click Search. After a brief delay, the matching names are displayed.
- Select the name from the list and click Accept.
- Type one or more characters for the beginning of the names to search.
For example, to locate users named aalberto and amoss, type
- To clear the displayed user or group name (select none), click Clear User.
- To select a different user, click Select
User.
- If you need to change the available properties, click Modify.
The User Preferences page opens.
- Make any needed changes, and then click Accept. See User Preferences - Search for more information.
- Enter values to search for in the new available properties.
- If needed, enter text for the content conditions.
- If needed, select any check boxes at the bottom of the page. These can be used in addition to the above search criteria or instead of them. Note that these search options are ANDed with other search criteria, so watch that you do not set up impossible combinations such as selecting two different users as the creator of a document.
- To execute your search, click Search.
- Review your search results. Note that the Actions Menu is available and you can modify your list by using the View and Show Items menus.
- To apply an action to one or more of the result items, select the check box
to the left of the items. Click an action to apply the action
to the selected items. For example, to check out a set of documents,
click Check Out.
NOTE The list of actions includes only those actions that can be performed for all of the selected items. For example, if you attempt to check in a document that is not checked out, an error occurs.
- You can click Show Search Criteria or Hide Search Criteria to toggle displaying the search criteria.
NOTE To clear the search results and the search criteria and restore the original settings, click Clear.
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