Using Advanced Search

Meridian Explorer provides two types of property searches: simple searches as described in Searching in document content and advanced searches as described in this topic. Advanced searches let you specify not only the property values that you want but also matching conditions, Boolean operators, or combinations of criteria. Advanced searching must be enabled by a system administrator.

You define an advanced property search by specifying one or more properties that you want to search in and a value for each property that you want to search for. Each combination of a property name and its value are called a criterion. You can specify any number of criteria but you must specify at least one. You may optionally combine the property search criteria with an object tag ID to find only those items that are related to a specific object tag. When you find the items that you are looking for, you can save the current search criteria as a view filter for later reuse.

Note    The available search options are configured by a system administrator and may not include all of the options described in the following task.

To perform an advanced search on document properties:

1. On any view page, in the navigation frame, click the Search bar. The available search options appear. By default, one or more search criteria with empty Value fields might be available. These are configured by a system administrator.

To use a search criterion, type a search value in its Value column.

To search in a different property, click the property name and select a different property from the drop-down list. The available properties are configured by a system administrator.

To add another search criterion:

• Right-click a criterion row and select Insert Property from the shortcut menu.

OR

• In the Search split button, click the arrow and then click Add Property from the shortcut menu that appears.

A new row appears in the search criteria list.

To remove one or more criteria:

1. Select the criteria that you want to remove. Press and hold the Ctrl key while clicking to select multiple criteria. Press and hold the Shift key while selecting the first and last criteria of a range of criteria.
2. Right-click the selected criteria and select Remove from the shortcut menu. The selected criteria are removed from the search criteria list.

2. When you are finished specifying search criteria:

To clear the current search criteria and start over:

• In the Search split button, click the arrow and then click Reset from the menu that appears.

OR

• Right-click the criteria and select Reset from the shortcut menu.

To specify value matching conditions, Boolean operators, or combine criteria:

1. In the Search split button, click the arrow and then click Advanced on the menu that appears. Additional columns appear in the search criteria list that you can use to specify advanced search options. How to specify the options is described as follows.

Note    When the Advanced option is enabled, if you select a value from a list, the Equals operator is always used but if you type a value, the default operator as configured by the system administrator is used. Since the value lists contain complete values (not keywords), this prevents unnecessary Contains searches in large repositories, which are slower than Equals searches. If the value that you type contains an asterisk (*) and the default operator is Equals, the Contains operator will be used instead so that the wildcard will be evaluated correctly.

Note    Wildcard characters are supported only by the Wildcard and Not Wildcard operators.

To group criteria that you want to be evaluated together:

1. Select the criteria that you want to group. Press and hold the Ctrl key while clicking to select individual criteria. Press and hold the Shift key while selecting the first and last criteria of a range of criteria.
2. Right-click over the selected criteria and select Group from the shortcut menu. Dotted lines in the second column enclose the selected criteria.

To separate criteria so that they are evaluated separately:

1. Select the criteria that you want to separate . Press and hold the Ctrl key while clicking to select individual criteria. Press and hold the Shift key while selecting the first and last criteria of a range of criteria.
2. Right-click over the selected criteria and select Ungroup from the shortcut menu. The dotted lines in the second column are removed from the selected criteria.

3. Click the Search button to execute the search. The search results appear in the results pane.

To go back to the previous or to go to the next search results:

1. Click the or button