How search works in BMC Digital Workplace

Sometimes business users do not get the search results that they expect. This topic provides information to help you understand the search results.

Types of records searched

Search is available in different areas of BMC Digital Workplace. The following table indicates the type of record that is searched:

Type of search	BMC Digital Workplace record searched	Records searched from integrated products
Catalog search from the BMC Digital Workplace client	Items in the enriched catalog How-to articles Quick links	Articles from BMC HR Case Management Knowledge articles from Remedy ITSM Offerings from BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management Service Request Definitions (SRDs) from Service Request Management Solutions from BMC HR Case Management
Superbox search from the BMC Digital Workplace client	BMC Digital Workplace profiles (asset, group, location, service health, user) Items in the enriched catalog How-to articles Quick links Social data (notification, posts, appointments) Submitted requests Items in the enriched catalog	Articles from BMC HR Case Management Knowledge articles from ITSM Offerings from BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management SRDs from Remedy ITSM (Service Request Management) Solutions from BMC HR Case Management Submitted requests through Remedy ITSM (Service Request Management) and BMC HR Case Management
Timeline search	Appointments Approvals Posts Requests Reservations	None

In addition, the API and widget search items in the enriched catalog and knowledge articles from Remedy ITSM.

Data matches

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

Record searched	Fields	Case insensitive?	Partial match?	Additional information
Appointments	description	yes	no	not applicable
Approvals	title request ID order ID requested for requested by	no	yes	not applicable
Articles from BMC HR Case Management	title summary description	yes	no	not applicable
BMC Digital Workplace profiles (asset, group, location, service health, user)	title	yes	yes	not applicable
How-to articles	title description keywords URL	yes	yes	not applicable
Items in the enriched catalog	title tag description	yes	yes	The enriched catalog is available only with Digital Workplace Advanced.
Knowledge articles from Remedy ITSM	all knowledge article fields	yes	no	full text search (FTS) Although the search does not perform a partial match, 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 "print" as the search term, a knowledge article with the title "printer problem" is not found. However, if the business user enters "print%" as the search term, the knowledge article with the title "printer problem" is found.
Offerings from BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management	title	yes	yes	not applicable
Timeline posts	post text	yes	no	not applicable
Quick links	title description	yes	yes	not applicable
Reservations	reservation text	yes	yes	not applicable
Social data (notification, posts, appointments)	appointment description post text notification text	yes	yes	not applicable
Solutions from BMC HR Case Management	title summary	yes	yes	not applicable
SRDs from Remedy ITSM (Service Request Management)	title description keywords	no	yes	SRDs are case insensitive if the FTS setting is enabled in the Remedy system.
Submitted requests (from timeline search)	title Requests ID Order ID Requested for Requested by	no	yes	not applicable
Submitted requests for enriched catalog items (from Superbox search)	Request ID Order ID	not applicable	yes	Request ID and Order ID are numeric values; case insensitive does not apply.
Submitted requests for HR cases (from Superbox search)	title Case ID	no	yes	not applicable
Submitted requests for items in Remedy ITSM (from Superbox search)	title Request ID Order ID	no	yes	not applicable

Search in BMC Digital Workplace is accent sensitive. If you type Jose, you will not see José in the search results.

Multiword search for enhanced catalog items

Multiword search relies on the full text search (FTS) capabilities of BMC Digital Workplace Catalog. For information about how to configure the multiword search in BMC Digital Workplace Catalog, see Configuring-search-for-enhanced-catalog-items-in-BMC-Digital-Workplace.

The following table describes how multiword search works for enhanced catalog items in BMC Digital Workplace:

Multiword search logic	Description	Example
Not a full phrase match	Multiword search does not return a full phrase match but uses an OR condition for multiple search words.	The search phrase Employee on-boarding process returns all results that contain any of the terms: Employee, on-boarding, process.
Stemming	Search terms are stemmed. Stemmed search reduces inflected or derived words to their word stem.	The search term employees returns all results that contain employee.
Phrase as one item	Search supports phrase as one item. Search terms are not stemmed for this search type. Word order matching can be achieved by surrounding words in double quotes (" ").	The search phrase standard request returns all results that contain services with standard request but not request standard.
Case sensitivity	Search is not case sensitive for title, version, tag, and description metadata of a service.	N/A
Ranking	Search returns the best match results—ranked according to the Keyword Field Weight values set in Remedy Mid Tier configured for BMC Digital Workplace Catalog .	N/A

Stop words ignored during search

Stop words can affect search results, because stop words are ignored during search. To check the stop words used by BMC Digital Workplace, perform the following steps:

On your BMC Digital Workplace and Smart IT server, navigate to digitalInstallationFolder/ux/WEB-INF/lib where digitalInstallationFolder is the location where 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 are stop words for the indicated locale. For example, stopwords_fr.txt contains the stop words for French.

Although you can view the stop words, BMC does not support changing the stop words.