Searching for words or phrases

During a word or phrase search, the Full Text Search engine finds requests that contain the specified word or phrase in the field.

To perform a word or phrase search

1. Open a form for which you want to search the records.
2. In a field in the form, enter double-quotation marks around the word or phrase that you want to use as search criteria.
   The syntax for the search qualification is:

For example, to search for the phrase firewall blocked, type:

With this example, a full text search finds requests with the phrase firewall blocked with the search for blocked expanded to the word stem block with any of its variants.

The use of wildcards in a word or phrase search affects how stemming is used. Stemming is a feature where entering a portion of a word returns results with multiple variations of the word with that portion of the word. For more information, see Searching for variations of word stems.

The following table provides some examples of the search results of a search that uses a word or phrase search. The table shows a sample qualification and the possible instances that might be available in the database (Example data column). The Matches column highlights only those instances that are displayed as results for that qualification criteria:

Searching with a wildcard character

Users can use the percent sign (%) wildcard for any type of search to broaden the set of matching requests. For example, searching with the term %fire returns requests with fire and backfire. Searching with fire% returns requests with fire and firewall. Searching with %fire% returns all combinations.

A FTS adds wildcards to search strings, but wildcards are not used in searches across multiple forms.

For example, if you search for doc with FTS, the percent wildcard (%) is added before and after the string (for example, %doc%). Results can include strings such as Doctor, Dock, doctrine, and haddock. Conversely, for searches across multiple forms, wildcards are not added. It is assumed that the application knows what the actual terms are (because the application is already using full text search and controlling it more closely).

For more information about searching across multiple forms and examples, see Performing-searches-on-multiple-forms.

Searching for variations of word stems

The FTS engine uses stemming to search for common variations of word stems. For example, a word search for the term block returns requests containing these terms:

• block
• blocks
• blocked
• blocking

Searching for blocking returns the same set of requests. 

Stemming is not used in the following searches:

• Wildcard searches when there is a leading wildcard— For example, if the search term is %blocking or %blocking%, the AR System serverreturns only requests containing blocking. However, if the search term is blocking%, the AR System server returns all requests containing block.
• Case-sensitive searches—For example, a case-sensitive search for block returns only requests containing block.