Searches for artifacts in requirements projects

You can find artifacts by using quick search, full-text search, and filters. Search can be done with the artifact ID or with text within the artifact.

Quick Search

To see recently viewed artifacts, click the Recently Viewed Artifacts icon .

Use the Quick Search feature to quickly search for artifacts in projects or components. You can search in the current project or component, another project or component, or all projects or components. In a configuration-enabled project, the Quick Search feature is only supported in a global configuration context.

Click the project or component icon to set the scope of the Quick Search. By default, the scope is the Current Project.
In the Search Artifacts field, enter an ID or text string to search for. If you enter an ID, the search returns the artifact with that ID. If you enter a string, a full-text search is performed. To know more about full-text search, refer to the Full-text search section.
Note: In 6.x, Quick Search results were ordered by each match's relevance to the query. In 7.x, however, the results are now ordered by artifact ID in descending order.
Specify more options to further limit the search, such as modification details, the artifact type, and whether to search in modules, folders, or both.

The Quick Search options are saved across browser sessions.

Filters

Use the Type to filter by text or by ID field to filter and search for artifacts. To filter based on ID, enter an ID and the search returns the artifact with that ID.

Note: To search for an artifact by ID, in the Type to filter by text or by ID field, enter the complete ID. When you search by ID, the search operation performs a full-text search and uses whole-word matching to find the exact match for the ID. The search eliminates partial matches from the results and displays the artifact with that exact ID.

To filter artifacts based on text in the artifact, enter a single search string or multiple strings. A full-text search looks for the specified word or phrase within the content of the artifact and in attributes that are String data type. If you enter multiple search terms, the search returns artifacts that match all the terms. See the following section on full-text search for more details.

You can narrow the search results further by adding filters such as the artifact type, modification date, and tag criteria. You can also sort and group the results and add or suppress artifact details from the results. See Filters and views for artifacts in requirements projects for details on filtering, page settings, and column display.

Full-text search

A full-text search looks for the specified word or phrase within the content of the artifact and in attributes that are String data type. For example, Name and Description. The search returns artifacts that contain a word that starts with the search string. By default, the full-text search operation uses word stemming. The stemming tokenizer reduces words to a root. For example, iteration is reduced to iter. The search operation looks for roots that are an exact match of the search term. To perform a starts with search without using word stemming, append an asterisk to your search term.

Note:

Searches are not case-sensitive.
If you enter multiple search strings, artifacts that contain any of the search strings are returned.

You can preface each search term with an asterisk (*) to do a contains search instead of a starts with search.

Use double quotation marks to search for an exact phrase. The search returns artifacts that contain all the words, and they are in the exact order that you entered.

Note: When you search using double quotation marks, word stemming provides the closely matched artifacts along with the exactly matched artifacts in the search results.

The following table shows some example artifacts with some textual content. The next table has some search entries and their resulting search returns.

Table 1. Example artifact content
Artifact Number	Artifact Name	Artifact content
1	Automatic Meter Reader	A system to automatically collect data on consumption, pressure or other diagnostic, and status from a meter.
2	Meter Reading	The ability to walk by the locations where the meters are installed, and the meter is automatically registered by a handheld computer that is carried by the meter reader.
3	Usage Scenario	The Meter Reader is unable to collect usage data from the Water Meter due to lack of connection or a fault.
4	Fault Scenario	The Meter Reader sends a command to retrieve the fault status.

Table 2. Example search entries and their results
Search entry	Search results
read*	Artifacts 1, 2, 3, and 4. These artifacts have the words reader and reading, which start with the search string read.
held	No artifacts. None of the artifacts have words that start with the search string held.
*held	Artifact 2. This artifact has the word handheld, which contains the search string held.
"collect data"	Artifact 1. This artifact has the exact phrase collect data.
auto*	Artifacts 1 and 2. These artifacts have the words automatic and automatically, which start with the search string.
automat	Artifacts 1 and 2. These artifacts have the words automatic and automatically, which have a root of “automat” and will match the search string.
auto	No artifacts. The word stems for the words automatic and automatically, which do not match the search term.
scenario	Artifacts 3 and 4. These artifacts have the word scenario, which starts with the search string scenario.
presscoll	Artifact 1. This artifact has the words pressure and collect, which start with both the search strings press and coll.

Restriction:

Full-text search does not support special characters. If any of these characters ( ){ }[ ] <> / \ : ; ? ! _ - | & . , ' « » ~ ^ are included in the search string, the results are unpredictable. Also, since these characters are not indexed, they do not affect search results. For example, if your search entry is test, you get matches for <test>, {test} even though the search is a starts with search.
For more information on this limitation, review the workarounds and limitations article on jazz.net.
Full-text search does not index * and ". For more information, see Table 2.
Full text search does not index these common words: a, an, and, are, as, at, be, but, by, for, if, in, into, is, it, no, not, of, on, or, such, that, the, their, then, there, these, they, this, to, was, will, and with. When you perform a search by using these common words, the search does not return any result.
Full text search does not index single letter words. For example, if an artifact has the name "Requirement X", searching for "x" does not return a match for the artifact.

Setting a limit to the full-text search results

If the full-text search results exceed the limit that is specified in Advanced properties, a warning message is displayed.

Note: When you add filters to the full-text search query, the specified limit is first applied to the full-text search results. These results are then filtered by the additional conditions.

To specify the number of artifacts that are returned when doing a full-text search, on the Administration menu, click Manage Server Administration > Advanced Properties. You can set the limit for modules in Text search maximum results – Module and for other requirement artifacts in Text search maximum results – General. When a text search scope is not set to a module, the general maximum limit is applied. When a text search scope is set to a module, the module maximum limit is applied.

If you perform a search and the query does not return any result, a message appears to indicate that no results were found.