Advanced search tricks

Here are some tricks that may help you manage complex searches.

• In a discussion message, the subject, body, and author are searched individually. Therefore, the query "hot AND cold" finds a discussion message if one of its fields contains both the words "hot" and "cold." It does not find messages with only the word "hot" in the subject and only the word "cold" in the body.
• Some common words, such as "at" or "and," don't appear in search results. For example, searching for "print at" is the same as searching for "print." These words are filtered out: a, and, are, as, at, be, but, by, for, if, in, into, is, it, no, not, of, on, or, s, such, t, that, the, their, then, there, these, they, this, to, was, will, with
• If your search term includes special characters, enclose the search term in double quotes. For example, if you search for "audio-video" without quotes, you get all the artifacts that contain "audio," but not "video." If you enclose the term in quotes, you get artifacts with the whole term "audio-video."
• These characters are considered special characters: && || ! ( ) { } [ ] ^ " ~ * ? : \
• The special character "+" is the same as the Boolean operator AND. The character "-" is the same as the Boolean operator AND NOT.
• Use parentheses to group clauses into sub-queries. For example, to search for either "jakarta" or "apache" and "website" use the query: (jakarta OR apache) AND website. This eliminates any confusion and makes sure that the website must exist and either term jakarta or apache may exist.
• Items that are part of the Project Dashboard component and the Project Metrics component do not show up in search results.
• To search for documents whose fields contain values within a specified range, use the TO operator. For example, [120 TO 125] returns the artifacts whose fields contain values between 120 and 125, inclusive. To leave out the end points of the range, use curly brackets instead.
• To find items within a range of dates, use YYYYMMDD notation and the TO operator. For example, [20020101 TO 20030101] finds you documents whose fields have values between 2002/01/01 and 2003/01/01, inclusive.
• To find items that are in an alphabetical range, use the TO operator. For example, {Aida TO Carmen} will find all documents whose titles are alphabetically between Aida and Carmen, but don't include Aida and Carmen.
• To search for words that are a within a specific distance from each other, use the tilde symbol ~ at the end of a phrase. For example to search for "apache" and "jakarta" within 10 words of each other in the text, use this search string: "jakarta apache"~10.

Using advanced search

Clicking on the Advanced search link will take you to the Search page where you can select more options to limit your search results. This page includes a Search string text field where you can enter the word or search phrase, a Scope selection field where you can limit the scope of the search, as well as a selection box labeled Artifacts to search. This selection box allows you to choose which project artifacts or components to search. For example, if you are looking for a message regarding new milestones that was sent to one of the projects you participate in, but are unsure of whether it appeared in the projects' discussions, you could enter the following advanced search:

• Search string: new AND milestones
• Scope: <project name> <project type> only. (This option allows you to search only in the project which you are in).OR
• Scope: My projects
• Artifacts to search: select both Help Documentation and Discussions.

You can also extend you search to include:

• The entire<domain name> domain.
• The current project and its sub-projects "<project name> project and its sub-projects" in case of search within projects OR "<project group name> project group and its sub-groups" in case of search within project groups OR "<category name> category and its sub-categories" in case of search within categories. (This option allows you to search in the project/group/category which you are in and its sub-projects/subgroups/sub-categories. This option will not appear if the project/group/category does not have any sub-projects/subgroups/sub-categories).Subversion search of all projects.

You can search Subversion revision repositories for commits based on the following information:

• Log messages
• Names of authors
• Date ranges
• Combinations of the above criteria

This search capability does not include search of contents of repositories or files.

Some sample searches

• you can search for commits based on the log messages in all projects. A search for Issue12345 will fetch the results of all commits whose log messages hold this text.
• you can search for commits within a given date range, or commits made on a single date using the YYYYMMDD format. If you searched using 20070123 (for the date format YYYYMMDD,) the search will fetch all commits made on Jan 23 2007. If you searched using commit_date:[20070123 TO 20070603] the search will fetch all commits made between the date range Jan 23 2007 and June 3 2007.
• you can search for commits made by an author with a search pattern like author:john_doe in all projects. This will return a list of commits by the user John Doe.

Filtering Search results

When you search for a particular word or term, you can simply type in the text for the search and click the button Search. This will display all the results, listing the artifacts/issues/documents in the tool within which you ran the search. You can further filter your search results by adding some parameters. This will narrow down your search and give you a much better chance of finding what you were looking for in a limited set of search results.

For example, if you were looking for "cornflakes" in Project Tracker artifacts and their attachments, you can type "cornflakes" in the search field, choose Project Tracker under Project tools to search and click the button Search. This will display all artifacts and attachments that contain the specified text.

If you would like to further hone down the results using the name of the author of the artifacts that hold "cornflakes" then you will have to add author to your text in the search field: cornflakes author:Jackson or cornflakes AND author:Jackson. This will display all artifacts and attachments that contain "cornflakes" authored by Jackson.

Note: You can add a whitespace or an "AND" to include one or more search parameters. When you do a search where the author is one word author:Jane, the search will work. If the author's name has two words and includes a space between, you can enclose it in double quotes - author:"Jane Doe ".

If you would like to further enhance the search by defining more parameters, you can add more filters. Using a combination of filters you can use search effectively to narrow down your options.

For example, if you would also like to repeat the above search for "cornflakes" where the author is Jackson and another filter for the subject of that artifact, your search field will have the text:

cornflakes author:Jackson subject:breakfast or cornflakes AND author:Jackson AND subject:breakfast

In Project Tracker, you may have several fields where you enter information while creating or editing an artifact, but the fields that are used as filters are only those that are indexed by the search indexer.

A note about the search indexer: Sometimes when you create several artifacts in Project Tracker, all of the artifacts will not be indexed immediately. If you run a search looking for some of these artifacts, the search results may not include them. This is because the domain administrator sets the time for the indexer to run at periodic intervals. The search results will include the artifacts only after they have been indexed. However, you can request the administrator to do a Full Index Rebuild to index all new additions to any tool, if required.

When you search in Project Tools to Search > Projects, you can use the following filters that have been indexed:

• description:
• title:
• subject:
• author:
• projectid:
• uri:

Similarly for the other tools:

Project Tools to Search	Search filters
Users	email: organization: title: realName: projectid: uri:
Discussions	body: subject: title: author: projectid: uri:
Subversion revision properties	commit_date title: author: projectid: uri:
HTML Content	title: filename: projectid:
Help Documentation	uri:
Project Tracker (search includes attachments)	description: title: subject: body: author: projectid: uri:
Issue Tracker (search includes attachments)	title: subject: body: author: projectid: uri:
Wiki (search includes attachments)	title: body: documentname title (attachments) body (attachments) filename (attachments)