Text search tips
If text search is enabled, you can use text to narrow your searches and return more specific results. By defining text criteria, you can find specific words within a document. You can search for exact matches, use phrases, use wildcard characters, exclude terms, and define how close or far words are in a document. Depending on the search engine configuration for your repository, available search options or operators might change.
Matching terms exactly
Surrounding a name or
phrase with double quotation marks (") returns search results that contain that exact phrase in the
order that the words are displayed in the
query.
| Find | Sample query in the search box |
|---|---|
| The phrase Justice Department without related phrases. | "Justice Department" |
| All of the information for a 2011 company annual report for a specific year and not the reports for previous years. | "2011" annual report |
Searching for unknown or variable characters or terms
Wildcard characters, such as an asterisk (*) or question mark (?), are useful when you are not sure of the spelling, exact name, or variations of a term. Use the asterisk (*) to match none or multiple characters, but only one term. Use the question mark (?) for a single character.
For example, the query czech* returns documents with the terms czech, czechoslovakia, czechoslovakian, and other words that start with the characters czech, including the word czech without any following characters.
You can also use the wildcard characters in a phrase search. For example, the query John * Kennedy returns documents with the terms John Fitzgerald Kennedy and John F Kennedy.
An
asterisk (*) wildcard character behaves differently on different repositories. In IBM
FileNet® P8 and IBM Content Manager, an asterisk (*)
matches any number of characters, including no characters, within a single term. It does not match
across a word separator (two or more terms), and it must include a term with at least one character
to match. For example, Jo*dy does not match John
Kennedy (two terms).
The query term fin*int matches fingerprint but not fine print.
The search term ra?or matches razor or rasor, but not raptor. Multiple question marks in a row stand for the same number of characters as there are question marks. For example, psych????y matches either psychology or psychiatry but not psychotherapy.
| Find | Sample query in the search box |
|---|---|
| Information about the judicial court system, such as court documentation, court dockets, or docking court hours. | doc* court |
| All reports that are generated by the legal defense departments in both America and Canada. The file names for the reports include the word defense or defence depending on the spelling preference for each country. | legal defen?e |
| The name Mikhail Gorbachev. | Mi*l Gorbachev |
Searching for words in proximity of each other
To further narrow your search, you can restrict the search results to
terms that appear within a range of words. Terms that are close to each other are more likely to be
related than terms that are far apart in a document. For example, a smaller number returns the
documents where there is a strong connection between term A and term B. A larger number returns the
documents that contain both terms, but their relationship is not as close.
| Find | Sample query in the search box |
|---|---|
| You are reviewing statistics for the crime rates that involve certain vehicles in a specific part of a city. You want to find insurance claims that include information about crimes that involve minivans and are handled by specific police precincts. | north police reports minivans car jacking Enter 15 words for the proximity search so that you get fewer results that are a closer match. |
| You are gathering research for possible side effects that occurred in diabetes drug trials in the United States and Canada. Your first task is to locate medical records for patients in North America and who are in drug trials for diabetes within a range of words. | North America diabetes drug trials Enter 1000 words for the proximity search so that you get a wider range of results. |
Excluding terms
Use the minus sign (-) to exclude items that contain certain terms. The minus
sign (-) applies to a term and its variants.
| Find | Sample query in the search box |
|---|---|
| Documents about the philosopher Calvin and not the cartoon character Calvin. | Calvin -Hobbes. |
| Documents and images about the original Star Trek series and not about Voyager and Star Trek: The Next Generation. | Star Trek -Voyager -"Next Generation". |
Tip: To use the minus sign (-) before your search terms, click . Requiring terms
Use the plus sign (+) to
find the items that contain all of the terms that you enter and not just some of them. Placing the
plus sign (+) at the front of a term ensures that both terms are included in the search results.
Requiring terms is slightly different from an exact match. The exact match is typically used to find
phrases where the terms are in a specific order. Requiring terms does not require multiple terms to
be in a specific order.
| Find | Sample query in the search box |
|---|---|
| Only documents that mention landing failures on Mars. | Mars +landings +failures |
| Insurance claims for house fires in specific cities in Washington. | house fires +claims +Seattle +Vancouver |
Tuning text searches
By default, IBM Content Navigator sorts search results by using the Name property. When you do a text search by using IBM FileNet P8, sorting by the Name property takes longer to return a result set than if the search is configured to sort by the Rank property.
If a text search takes too long to run or times out, modify the search criteria so that the search results are sorted by using the Rank property.
Expanding or limiting property searches
You can use search operators to help define your search. The search operators are based on properties that are commonly used. The operators are shortcuts to commonly selected criteria, such as ownership (for example, added by me) or modification date (for example, modified in the last month).
To scope text search criteria to the selected properties, use the Contains operator
to search for any word or phrase within a particular property. The operator is available if the
property that you select is enabled for content-based retrieval (CBR). You can combine a text search
with property searches when you define text search criteria by using the main text search query box
or the Contains operator. Conditions that use the Contains operator are separate from property
search, so the match all or any property option applies only to conditions that use operators other
than the Contains operator. When you open a saved search, any conditions that use the Contains
operator appear first in the list of property search conditions.
To further define each property, you can select Advanced settings. Move your mouse cursor over to the right of a property field, four icons appear: Move up, Move down, Advanced settings, and Remove. Click Advanced settings to open a window. Select a property option from the drop-down list. To select all filters for operators, click Use all to apply all listed filters. Or, select Use selected to specify specific filters that you need.
Defining the text search
The text search feature provides more options to narrow down searching for specific text: Editable, Read only, Required, and Hidden. To select an option for your search, for IBM FileNet P8, click Text options and select one of these options from the Text search is drop-down list. For IBM Content Manager EE Version 8, directly select one of the options from the Text search is drop-down list.