Troubleshooting issues with search in BMC Helix Digital Workplace

The actual search results in BMC Helix Digital Workplace might differ from the results that business users expect to receive.

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 Helix Digital Workplace records
User profiles	First name Last name Login ID Full name Email	Partial match	Not applicable
Group profiles	Group name	Partial match	Not applicable
Locations	Title Address Site name Telephone Description	Partial match	Not applicable
Assets	Name Email Description Tag	Partial match	Not applicable
Appointments	Location Description	Partial match	Not applicable
How-to links	Title Description Keywords URL	Partial match	Not applicable
BMC Helix Digital Workplace Catalog records
Services and bundles from the enhanced catalog	Title Tag Description	Partial match Full match	The search is case insensitive if the FTS setting is enabled in the BMC Helix Digital Workplace Catalog platform. For more details about search options, see Multiword search.
Submitted requests for services and bundles in the enhanced catalog	Title Request ID Order ID Requested for Requested by Submitted answers	Partial match	Request ID and Order ID are numeric values. The search by answers does not work for hidden questions. Submitted answers are included in search only if this setting is configured in the BMC Helix Digital Workplace application settings. For information about how to configure search for enhanced catalog, see Configuring-search-for-enhanced-catalog-items-in-BMC-Helix-Digital-Workplace.
Approvals from BMC Helix Digital Workplace Catalog	Title Request ID Order ID Requested for Requested by	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 solutions 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 Helix ITSM records
SRDs from BMC 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 SRM provider to return services that have all search keywords in their metadata. For information about how to configure search for SRM provider, see List-of-providers. Word stemming is supported. For example, the search term globally returns all results that contain global.
Knowledge articles from BMC Helix ITSM	All knowledge article fields	Partial match Full match	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. When the full match search is configured, 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 user enters printe% as the search term, the knowledge article with the title printer problem is found. If you enable the rkm.search.force.leading.trailing.wildcards parameter, you do not need to insert the full title of the knowledge article and a wildcard. For example, if a business user enters printe as the search term, a knowledge article with the title printer problem is found. If a business user enters incre memor, a knowledge article with the title increase memory will be found.
Submitted requests for services in BMC Helix ITSM	Title Request ID Order ID Requested for Requested by Submitted answers	Partial match	A minimum of three characters is required to start the 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 the 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	Not applicable
BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management records
Offerings from BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management	Title	Partial match	Not applicable

Multiword search for enhanced catalog items

Multiword search relies on the full-text search (FTS) capabilities of BMC Helix Digital Workplace Catalog. The following table describes how the multiword search works for enhanced catalog items in BMC Helix 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. For Catalog Requests, an OR condition is applied only if search queries are separated by a comma.	The search phrase Employee on-boarding process returns all results that contain any of the following terms: Employee, on-boarding, process.
Stemming	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.	Not applicable
Ranking	Search ranks according to the Keyword Field Weight values set in BMC Mid Tier configured for BMC Helix Digital Workplace Catalog.	Not applicable

For information about how to configure the multiword search in BMC Helix Digital Workplace Catalog, see Configuring-search-for-enhanced-catalog-items-in-BMC-Helix-Digital-Workplace.

Important

The BMC Helix Digital Workplace administrator can enable natural language processing search. This mode improves the accuracy of search results. For more information about enabling the natural language processing search engine, see Configuring-search-results.

Case sensitivity

Search for records in BMC Helix Digital Workplace is case insensitive. A Action Request System (AR System) administrator can set up case sensitivity for the records that exist on Action Request System (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

Submitted requests for services and bundles from the enhanced catalog
Appointments
Assets
Locations

Records with configurable case sensitivity

Case sensitivity depends on the underlying Action Request System (AR System) database setting for the following records:

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

Case sensitivity depends on the Action Request System (AR System) FTS case-sensitivity setting for the following records:

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

Services and bundles from the enhanced catalog
Approvals from BMC Helix Digital Workplace Catalog

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

To check the stop words

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

Important

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

To check the stop words used by BMC Helix Digital Workplace:

On your BMC Helix Digital Workplace server, navigate to DigitalWorkplaceInstallationFolder/dwp/WEB-INF/lib.
DigitalWorkplaceInstallationFolder is the location where BMC Helix Digital Workplace was installed.
Copy myit-server-version.jar to myit-server-version.zip where version is the version of BMC Helix 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.
Important
You cannot modify stop words.