Using Free text search

You can use the Free text search feature through the Product Master interface.

1. Click Free Text Search icon, in the upper-right corner of the interface.
2. Select the appropriate option (Catalog or Hierarchy), enter the search term, and click Search.

   Table 1. Tasks of the FTS page

   Icon	Description
   Open	Select an item or multiple items and click to open Items details page.
   Refresh	Click to refresh the search results.
   Catalog
   Checkout	Select an item, and click Checkout > <collaboration area> to check out the selected item to the specific collaboration area.
   Save as list	Click to open Save as list pop-up window. Enter an appropriate name in the List name field, and click Apply. You can access this saved list anytime through the Saved List option on the Search page.
   Generate Report	Click to export search results to a Microsoft Excel format. In the Generate Report pop-up window, select the appropriate script, and click OK. Note: Specify the value for the number of entries through the Maximum number of entries to be written to a report on Generate Report in Multi Edit list in the Admin UI. The generated report contains the PRIMARY_SPEC details only.
   Actions	Select an item, and click Actions > <action name> to open the <action name> pop-up window. Note: The Actions icon is only displayed if the entry preview script is configured for the selected catalog or container.
   Clear search	Click to undo the search results, and reset the search field.
   Publish	Click to publish specs from the IBM Product Master to the IBM Watson® Knowledge Catalog. For more information, see Publishing specs to the IBM Watson Knowledge Catalog.

3. To display only required attributes in an attribute collection, you can configure attributes that show in the Free text search results by adding the FTS Display Attribute Collection=<attribute collection name> property in the Catalog Attributes. By default, an entire attribute set is mapped to a catalog and hence the Free text search results can go beyond 200.
4. To automatically enable a fuzzy search that uses ~ (Tilde), set the value of the fts_enable_fuzzy_search property to True in the restConfig.properties file. By default, the value of the fts_enable_fuzzy_search property is False.

   Fuzzy search

   Format: Append ~ (Tilde) to each word.

   Result: Returns all documents where the search term is found.

   Use the query_string query of the Free text search with the value of the fuzziness parameter as Auto. The Fuzziness is interpreted by using the Levenshtein Edit Distance (Number of one-character changes that need to be made to one string to make it the same as another string). Allowed Levenshtein Edit Distance is:

   • If the length of a word is less than 2 characters, no edit rules. The word must match exactly.
   • If the length of a word is in the range 3 - 5 characters, the Levenshtein Edit Distance allows one edit. For example, Apple word, one misspelling works, but more than that fetches no results.
   • If the length of a word is more than 5, the Levenshtein Edit Distance allows two edits. For example, Apples word, two misspellings work, but more than that fetches no results.

   Note: Due to performance impact, do not use more than four words in the fuzzy search.

   Example

   Search term	Search results
   Strxxt~	Street
   NXw~ ZXXland~	New Zealand
   Country=NXw~ ZXXland~
   title=Wenn;city=Auckland	Wenn and Auckland
   title=Wenx~;city=Aucklanx~
   Uz~	No results
   Applx~ +Silvex~	Apple with Silver
   Release Date=[2020-01-13 TO 2021-08-14]	Results having specified range