How search works in BMC Digital Workplace

The actual search results in BMC Digital Workplace might differ from the results that business users expect to receive. As the BMC Digital Workplace administrator, you must understand how search works to assist your business users.

Related topics

Troubleshooting

Configuring full text search in the AR System documentation

Troubleshooting Remedy Full Text Search in the AR System documentation

Search types

End users can use the search feature from the following areas of the BMC Digital Workplace end user console:

Global search
Search in the Active events section
Search from the Social section

Global search

The Global search panel is available on the following pages:

Catalog page
My Activity page
(Optional) Custom page—The Global search component can be added to a custom page.

The global search panel looks like this:

End users can search for the following records:

Types of records	Records
BMC Digital Workplace records	User profiles How-to links
Catalog items	Articles and solutions from BMC HR Case Management Knowledge articles and SRDs from Remedy ITSM (Service Request Management) Quick links from BMC Service Request Management Offerings from BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management
Orders	Submitted requests through Remedy ITSM (Service Request Management) Submitted requests through BMC HR Case Management
Approval requests	Approval requests from BMC Remedy IT Service Management Approval requests from BMC HR Case Management

Search in the Active events section

End users can search for active events by keywords, which is analogous to Global search. Users can search for Requests and Approvals.

The option is available in the List View only. The following image shows the search options in the Active events section:

Search from the Social section

You can search for the following records in the Social section available on a user preferences page:

Users
User groups

The following image shows the Social section on a user preferences page:

Data matches

For each type of record that is searched, the following table indicates the fields that are searched and other factors that determine the search results:

Record searched	Fields	Partial match or full match	Additional information
BMC Digital Workplace records
User profile	First name Last name Login ID Full name Email	Partial match	Not applicable
Group profile	Group name	Partial match	Not applicable
How-to links	Title Description Keywords URL	Partial match	Not applicable
BMC HR Case Management records
Solutions	Title Summary	Partial match	Search returns all solutions that have at least one of the specified keywords.
Articles	Title Summary Description	Full match	Search returns all articles that have at least one of the specified keywords.
Submitted requests for HR cases	Title Request ID Requested for Requested by	Partial match	Not applicable
Approvals from BMC HR Case Management	Title Request ID Requested for Requested by	Partial match	Not applicable
BMC Remedy IT Service Management records
Quick links	Title Description	Partial match	Not applicable
SRDs from Remedy Service Request Management	Title Description Keywords Category 1 Category 2 Category 3	Partial match Full match	By default, search returns all services that have at least one of the specified keywords. You can configure the SRM provider to return services that have all search keywords in their metadata. For information about how to configure search for the SRM provider, see List of providers. Word stemming is supported. For example, the search term globally returns all results that contain global. For more information about word stemming, see Searching for variations of word stems .
Knowledge articles from Remedy ITSM	All knowledge article fields		By default, search returns all knowledge articles that have at least one of the specified keywords. You can configure the RKM provider to return knowledge articles that have all search keywords in their metadata. For information about how to configure search for the RKM provider, see List of providers. Tip: Users can append a wildcard symbol (%) to a searched word. The wildcard symbol matches any remaining characters or words. For example, if a business user enters "printe" as the search term, a knowledge article with the title "printer problem" is not found. However, if the business user enters "printe%" as the search term, the knowledge article with the title "printer problem" is found.
Submitted requests for services in Remedy ITSM	Title Requests ID Order ID Requested for Requested by Submitted answers	Partial match	A minimum of 3 characters is required to start search. The search by answers works only if the search.by.answer.enabled flag is set to true for the SRM provider. For details about how to enable search by answers for SRM pluggable provider, see List of providers. The search by answers is not supported for hidden questions.
Approvals from BMC IT Service Management	Title Request ID Order ID Requested for Requested by	Partial match
BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management records
Offerings from BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management	Title	Partial match	Not applicable

Case sensitivity

Search for records in BMC Digital Workplace is case insensitive. A BMC Remedy AR System administrator can set up case sensitivity for the records that exist on BMC Remedy AR System.

Case insensitive records
Records with configurable case sensitivity

Case insensitive records

Search is case insensitive for the following items:

Group profiles
How-to links
Offerings from BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management

Records with configurable case sensitivity

Case sensitivity depends on the underlying AR System database setting for the following records:

User profiles
Quick links
Approvals from BMC IT Service Management
Approvals from BMC HR Case Management
Submitted requests for services in Remedy ITSM

Case sensitivity depends on the BMC Remedy AR System FTS case-sensitivity setting for the following records:

Solutions
Articles
Submitted requests for HR cases
Knowledge articles from Remedy ITSM
SRDs from Remedy Service Request Management

Search results

Search results are displayed to end users according to the following principles:

Search results are sorted based on their relevance to the search query—from the most relevant on top, down to the least relevant. Results that have the same relevance are sorted alphabetically.
If no search results are found, the application displays the following message: "No results found is displayed," and the filter menu is hidden.
For SRDs from Remedy Service Request Management, search results are displayed in the following order:
- SRDs that are marked as popular by the administrator in Remedy Service Request Management are displayed on the top.
- SRDs that are requested more times than other SRDs are displayed after the popular SRDs.
- All following SRDs are displayed alphabetically by the SRD title.

If the search does not work as expected, you can troubleshoot this issue by debugging the logs. For more information, see Configuring logs.

To check the stop words

Stop words can affect search results because stop words are ignored during search.

Note

BMC Digital Workplace stop words do not affect SRDs from Remedy Service Request Management. SRDs search results are affected by Remedy FTS stop words list.

To check the stop words used by BMC Digital Workplace:

On your BMC Digital Workplace server, navigate to DigitalWorkplaceInstallationFolder/dwp/WEB-INF/lib where DigitalWorkplaceInstallationFolder is the location that BMC Digital Workplace was installed.
Copy myit-server-version.jar to myit-server-version.zip where version is the version of BMC Digital Workplace.
Extract the zip archive or navigate within the zip archive.
Navigate to com/bmc/bsm/myit/stopwords/.
The files in this directory contain stop words for the indicated locale. For example, stopwords_fr.txt contains the stop words for the French locale.
Note

You cannot modify stop words.