Leveraging full text and global search capabilities in your application

BMC Helix Innovation Studio provides the capability to enable Full Text Search (FTS) and global search in an application. FTS involves indexing before searching so that when a user performs a search, only the index is searched instead of the entire text. Global search searches the text in multiple forms across an application.

This use case describes a scenario about how a manager can leverage FTS and global search to get a list of employees who have taken special leave.

Scenario

An organization uses a leave approval application for submission and approval of leaves. A senior manager wants to generate a report that lists the employees from all departments who have taken special leave.

The application business analyst and the administrator enable FTS and the global search respectively, for the manager to perform a search across all record definitions in the application.

An application business analyst enables FTS, on fields such as type of leave, description, name, and department, of the leave approval application so that these fields are searchable by using FTS. The administrator enables global search in the leave approval application.

After FTS and global search is enabled in the application, the senior manager searches for special leave in the global search. The global search searches all the records in the leave approval application and displays the list of employees who have taken special leave.

Roles involved

The following roles are involved in enabling FTS and global search capabilities:

Application business analyst—Enables FTS on fields in the record definitions so that users can use FTS to search for data in those fields. Also defines the relevancy of the FTS-enabled fields.
Administrator—Enables global search for an application and performs additional configurations to enhance the search results after the application business analyst enables FTS on certain fields.

Result

A list of employees who have taken special leave is displayed. The manager can click each record and get the details of each leave request.

Benefits

Enabling FTS and global search in an application has the following benefits that are not available from a standard database search:

FTS can identify stem words and can return the results accordingly. For example, when you search for fire, the search results will include words such as firewall, backfire, firefighter, and firecracker.
FTS can weigh words according to their relevancy depending on where they appear—in a title, a keyword, or the text that is being searched. Results that match the title can be weighted as more relevant and can be displayed among the top search results.
Global search performs a search operation on multiple forms and searches across the application, unlike FTS, which searches within a single form. Global search searches all the fields that are FTS enabled. For example, in this use case, all fields that are FTS enabled will be searched for "special leave."

Where to go from here

Enabling-full-text-search-capabilities-in-your-application

Enabling-global-search-for-use-in-an-application