Use this menu item to search for something. The document search feature is available if you click on the magnification glass icon in the header bar.
The system remembers the previous searches, and they are displayed below the input field in the Recent Searches section. Enter a search term and you will get a search results preview in a few seconds. Selecting a previous search opens the Search Results screen immediately.
The results of the search are first presented as preview in an overlay weighted by the relevance of the search term. Clicking on a single entry in the list opens the detail view of the corresponding business object. The headlines of the section are also clickable and show the search results for the corresponding business object.
Click on the Show All button to display all results of the search. After clicking the Show All button in the overlay the results are presented in separate widgets per business object type. The Search Results screen is similar to the Personal Dashboard view.
Alternatively you can press the Enter key on your keyboard or click on the magnification glass icon to access the Search Results screen.
This screen lists all objects that match the search term. The objects are grouped by type. Clicking on an entry opens the corresponding detail view of the business object.
To find the desired object, open the filter section from the breadcrumb bar and use the filters to narrow the results. This section allows you to add fields of business objects, by which the search results list should be filtered. The filters can be saved as presets.
To apply a filter:
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Open the filter section by clicking the filter icon in the breadcrumb bar.
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Click on a business object in the Search Filtering section.
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Select a Field of the business object.
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Select an Operator. The operator depends on the selected field of the business object.
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Select or enter a value.
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Click on the Submit button.
The results are now displayed according to the filters specified. In this section it is also possible to add a custom label for the filter.
Several filter conditions can be applied and combined at the same time. To add another filter condition, repeat the steps explained above.
Each filter condition can be edited, disabled, removed or inverted. The inverted filter condition is displayed with red background.
Filter conditions can be saved as preset. The filter preset can be reused at any time. The usage of the filter preset is explained in the Navigation And Usage chapter.
The Search Results screen and its widgets can be configured as any other screen in OTRS.
Search Parameters
The query string consists of terms and operators. A term can be a single word or a phrase surrounded by double quotes. Operators allow you to customize the search.
- Single word
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If the query string is a single word (for example
quickorbrown), then OTRS searches for all items containing the given word.If two or more words are given in the query string (for example
quick brown), then OTRS searches for all items containing the wordquickorbrown. - Phrase surrounded by double quotes
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If the query string contains a phrase surrounded by double quotes (for example
"quick brown"), then OTRS searches for all items containing both the words in the phrase in the same order. - Wildcards
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Use
?to replace a single character, and*to replace zero or more characters (for examplequ?ck bro*).Note
Wildcard queries can lead to performance issues because many terms need to be queried to match the query string.
- Regular expressions
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Regular expression patterns can be embedded in the query string by wrapping them in slashes (for example
/joh?n(ath[oa]n)/).See also
The supported regular expression syntax is explained in regular expression syntax chapter of the Elasticsearch documentation.
- Fuzziness
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It is possible to search for terms that are similar to, but not exactly like the given search terms, using the fuzzy operator (for example
quikc~ brwn~ foks~).The default fuzziness level is 2, but a level of 1 should be sufficient to catch 80% of all human misspellings. It can be specified as
quikc~1.Fuzziness can be disabled with
quikc~0which will not consider spelling mistakes. - Proximity
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The query string like
"quick fox"searches the words in exactly the same order, but the proximity search allows that some other words can be included between the given words (for example"fox quick"~5).This operator specifies the maximum edit distance of the words. The phrase quick fox would be considered more relevant than quick brown fox.
- Ranges
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This query string can contain ranges of dates, numbers or strings. Inclusive ranges are specified with square brackets
[min TO max], and exclusive ranges are created with curly brackets{min TO max}. - Boosting
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The boost operator
^can be used to make one term more relevant than another. For example, use the query stringquick^2 fox, if you want to find all documents about foxes, but you are especially interested in quick foxes.You can also use boosts for phrases or groups, such as
"quick fox"^2 AND (brown lazy)^4. - Boolean operators
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The query string
quick brown foxsearches for all items containing one or more of the specified words.The preferred operators are
+(term must be present) and-(term must not be present). All other terms are optional.For example if the query string is
quick brown +fox -newsthen it means:-
foxmust be present. -
newsmust not be present. -
quickandbrownare optional.
The well known logical operators
AND,ORandNOT(or&&,||and!) are also supported. The query string((quick AND fox) OR (brown AND fox) OR fox) AND NOT newsis identical to the previous example. -
- Grouping
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Changing the precedence with parentheses is possible, like
(quick OR brown) AND fox. - Reserved characters
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There are some reserved characters which function as operators, and they can not be used in search queries.
The reserved characters are:
+ - = && || > < ! ( ) { } [ ] ^ " ~ * ? : \ /.If any of these characters need to be used in search queries, then you should escape them with a leading backslash. For example to search for the term (1+1)=2, you have to use the query string as
\(1\+1\)\=2.
See also
More information can be found in the query string syntax chapter of the Elasticsearch documentation.
