Search options in Focal Point®

You can search for elements in Focal Point^®. The application provides two search options: advanced search and in-view search.

Advanced search is based on indexed information of Focal Point^® attributes. You can use advanced search to do Boolean search, wild card search, fuzzy search and proximity search.

1 Enter a term or phrase in the search text field.

2 Select the scope where the search needs to be done. You can search a specific view or the entire workspace. Workspace-level search is limited to the first maximal views from each module that a normal user has access to. The workspace-level search option is not displayed if the user does not have access to any of the maximal views. For information about maximal views, see View attributes.

3 Use the search type option to select the type of search that you want. The following options are available:

▪ Full Search: The search is performed on all the visible attributes that are part of the elements that belong to the selected scope.

▪ Title/Prefix Search: The search is performed on only the Title and Prefix attributes of the elements that belong to the selected scope.

▪ Selective Search: The search is performed on only the selected attributes that belong to the scope.

When the search results are displayed as a table, you can use the pagination controls to change the page size as well as to progress through each page. To open an element, click the element title.

You can use the View Display option to show the elements of the search results in a new view.

Tip: If you cannot find a recently added element, it indicates that the search index is not updated to include the new element. New data is automatically added to the search index, but the search indexing might take a long time if the quantity of data to be updated is more.

This is the default search option. You can enter a single term or a search phrase to search for an element. Enter the search term or phrase in the Search text field on the upper, left corner of the Focal Point^® application window. Advanced search supports boolean operators and wildcard characters, and allows skipping special characters.

▪ If you are using a phrase, the group of words must be surrounded by double quotation marks. Example: "view element"

▪ The default search operator is “AND”. For example, if you search for "module view", only elements that contain both view and module are listed in the results.

▪ When you search for a single term, you can use wildcard characters. A question mark (?) denotes a single character and an asterisk (*) denotes multiple characters.

For example, if you search for te?t, the result might include text and test. If you search for test*, the result might include test, tests, and testing. Search terms such as ele? and e?e* are valid, but “leading wildcard search”, such as *ele, is not enabled, by default.

Searching with leading wildcards might be an expensive operation, as it requires scanning the list of tokens in the entire index for a pattern that matches the search string. This option is not available by default. To enable the use of wild card character in the beginning of strings, configure the lucene.allowleadingwildcard project setting to “true” by using this SQL command:

update projectsetting set value='true' where pid=-2 and name = 'lucene.allowleadingwildcard'

Note Wildcard searches are not applicable in Chinese and Japanese because in those languages, each character is considered to be a single term.

Operator	Symbol	Example	Finds
OR	\|\|	view OR module	All elements that contain either view or module
AND	&&	view AND module	All elements that contain both view and module. AND is the default operator.
NOT	!	view NOT module	All elements that contain view, but do not contain module. The hyphen (-) can also denote NOT.

If a search term contains special characters that are part of the query syntax, they can be escaped. The special characters are:

You can combine multiple terms with Boolean operators to form a more complex query by using parentheses. For example, if you search for (module OR element) AND workspace, the results include all the elements that contain workspace, and that also include either module or element.

To complete a fuzzy search, enter a tilde (~) at the end of a single word term.

A search can also find words that are within a specific distance from each other. To complete a proximity search, enter a tilde (~) at the end of a phrase.

For example, to search for module and element within three words of each other in an element, use "module element" ~3.

Within a view, you can search for an element based on the tile and prefix of the elements in the view. You enter the search keyword in the text field showing Search Viewname, and then click Enter. All the view elements matching the search test are displayed.