Advanced Searching

Overview

This article describes in detail the expected behaviour and results when:

• selecting from the available filtering options
• choosing terms to enter in searches using the Workspace Simple and Advanced search mechanisms
• using Notebook search
• using Lucene queries in your searching
• ordering and sorting results

Workspace Simple Search

Selecting filters

The filters described in the following sections can be selected by clicking on the funnel on the left side of the searchbar.

1. All

This search option is a combination of search by full-text, tag, name, form or attachment.

2. Text

Searches for documents where the content matches your term. Includes search over:

• the text of documents
• uploaded MSWord/PDF/plain text files (attachments) in the Gallery
• comment content
• caption content

3. Tag

This option searches for documents whose tags match your query.

4. Name

This option searches for documents whose name matches your term.

5. Form

This option searches for documents created using a particular Form (Experiment, ELISA, rtPCR, Lab Protocol…), whose Form name matches your query.

6. Template

This option searches for documents created using a particular template, whose template name matches your query.

7. Creation date

This option searches for documents that were created between two dates.

Note that you can use Clear in the date picker to select "from the beginning" or "to now".

8. Last modified

This option searches for documents that were last modified between 2 dates, or on a particular date.

9. Owner(s)

Searches for documents created by a particular user/owner whose username matches your term.

• This search option could be used by a PI with permission over a group (members) to search documents with different owners.
• You can also search by different owners when someone has previously shared some document with you.

After selecting the User search option, autocompleted suggestions that you can pick from will be displayed as you start typing.

10. Attachment

Searches text content of uploaded files anywhere in the Gallery for the term.

E.g. assuming you have uploaded a document called ‘example.xls’ containing the Word ‘osteoporosis’ to the Gallery:

11. Chemical

You can also search by chemical structures, using ChemAxon’s structure search feature. Read more about searching by chemical structures in our ChemAxon Integration article.

Searching within records

If you select one or more Folders/Notebooks/Documents from the Workspace listing (using the checkbox on the left end of an entry) and perform a search, you will be given the option to restrict results to selected items, which will restrict the search to the currently selected items and all their descendants. You can remove parts of your selection, by clicking on the cross next to an item in the panel. You also have an option to ignore the selection with the 'Search Everywhere' option.

Workspace Advanced Search

Advanced search essentially allows you to build more complex and fine-grained searches by adding more than one pair of filter and term sets, and the combination of all filters and terms are used to produce the results. So, for example, you can search for all documents produced by a particular user, and also search within a set date range.

To use advanced search:

1. Click on the hamburger (triple line) icon on the right side of the searchbar:

1. This will open the advanced search panel. You can add more conditions using the + icon next to the last condition.

1. It is possible to further control your results by using ‘Satisfy all conditions’ ('AND' operation) or ‘Satisfy at least one condition’ ('OR' operation) in your combinations.

1. Finally, you can remove a condition by clicking on the rubbish bin icon next to it.

   

The available options in the advanced search filters are:

1. Text
2. Tag
3. Name
4. Form
5. Template
6. Creation date
7. Last modified
8. Owner
9. Attachment
10. Within records

A few things to note:

• The semantics of individual sub-queries is the same as the Workspace simple search, searching over all files/folders visible to you, wherever you are in your folder tree.
• Advanced search by Text, Tag, Name, Form, Last Modified and Owner retrieve the same results as using simple search. In other words, performing an ‘Advanced Search’ with only a single search clause retrieves exactly the same results as when performed in the ‘Simple Search’.

Search within records

This additional option in the advanced search filter, 'Within records', allows you to restrict results of a search to selected items and all their descendants.

If you had one or more Folders/Notebooks/Documents selected in the Workspace listing (using the checkbox on the left end of an entry), the selection will appear when you select the Within records filter:

You can click the cross icon next to an item to remove it from the selection, or use the folder icon on the right of the selection to select more items:

Clicking on the folder will open a selection panel:

As with other filters in the Advanced Search, Within records can be combined with other filters to produce more fine-grained searches.

Notebook Search

This is the search capability available in the Notebook – it is essentially a “All” option to search over the contents of entries in the Notebook.

Expert Lucene Query Syntax

If you’re familiar with Lucene search syntax, you can run powerful queries from a single input field, by prefixing your query with l:. This syntax works for all the search categories, apart from Last Modified and Chemical search. Learn more about the Lucene query language here.

Searching across one field

For example, to find documents containing the word ‘rna’ AND ‘pcr’, search ‘Text’ with l: rna AND pcr. This is in effect a shortcut for using the Advanced Search UI. If you want to search for documents created by user ‘bob’ or ‘anna’ in your group, you could search ‘User’ with l:bob OR anna.

Searching across multiple fields

For example, suppose you want to search for records created by Bob or Anna, that are tagged with either ‘project’ or ‘project2’. In this case, we need to search across both users and tags, so you need to add the name of the indexes you want covered.

l: (owner.username:bob OR owner.username:anna) AND (docTag:project OR docTag:project2)

The parentheses are important to ensure the precedence of the OR/AND operators.

The field index names are as follows:

fields.fieldData – full text

docTag – tags

formName – form name

name – document or folder name

owner.username – username of the owner

For more details on Lucene syntax, please look at this reference documentation: http://lucene.apache.org/core/2_9_4/queryparsersyntax.html

Ordering and sorting results

By default, results are ordered by name and sorted DESC (descending).

The column headers that can also be used as ordering criteria are indicated by being blue ‘clickable’ links. You can change the column to use for sorting by clicking the link headers. In the following image, Name, Created and Modified are clickable:

The current column being used for the display order will have an ‘Order’ icon made of up and down arrows:

You can toggle the results order using the up/down icon (or just by clicking the column name again)– the icon will offer the alternative order to the current one and change the listing to that if clicked. That is, clicking on Modified once will sort the entries by Modified (Descending), and clicking again will sort by Modified (Ascending).

By default, Workspace records are ordered by Modified (Descending).

Showing more results per page

You can change the number of records per page using the Items per page option on the bottom-left of the Workspace, and you can navigate through the results using the numbered links: