Searching

To effectively search through the large amount of documents, transmittals, and other resources in your project, InfoPoint has a natural and powerful search.

There are a few ways to approach search:

  1. Free-form text (also called full-text search)
  2. Search by field

Both of these methods can be used together if desired.

Free-form text

Free-form text is the simplest way to search. To do so, enter your search terms into a search bar, and press search button. This type of search will look for the specified search terms across all fields (or metadata in the documents table), and give present results sorted by relevance. Relevance here is determined by the occurrence of search terms in the document, not by how recent it may have been uploaded or updated.

When searching free-form text:

  • Word stems are considered (e.g. 'ing', 'ed', 's', 'ies')
  • Casing is not important. e.g. Plan will match plan
  • Partial words are not supported, i.e. searching pres will not match words such as present, presence, or president.
  • You can negate particular words by prepending a dash (e.g. -information will search for resources without the word information)
  • For documents, text in the document name is weighted higher than metadata

Search by Field

Searching by field gives more control over the results of a search. To search by a field, simply enter the field name followed by a value. For example, to find documents where the name contains the word  minutes, the following search would be used:

name: minutes

To search by multiple fields, simply add the extra fields. For example, searching documents where it's name contains the word minutes, or the description contains the phrase meeting minutes:

name: minutes description: "meeting minutes"

Alternatively, you could request that the name contains minutes AND the description contains the phrase meeting minutes:

name: minutes AND description: "meeting minutes"

If you want to search multiple words in any order, anywhere in the metadata, you can seperate them with a comma. For example to find a description with the words meeting and minutes in any order:

description: meeting, minutes

You can also negate search criteria by specifying the  NOT keyword before the field. For example, documents where the name does not include the word draft:

NOT name: draft

If the field is numeric, you can also search by bounds. For example, if you had a numeric metadata field on your documents called estimated_expense, and you wanted all the documents that had a values between 1000 and 10,000:

estimated_expense: > 1000 AND estimated_expense: < 10000

Date fields can also be searched using natural language. For example, to see documents that were uploaded this month, or in a specific month:

uploaded: "this month"

uploaded: "July 2019"

Dates also work with bounds. For example, documents uploaded within the last year could be searched:

uploaded: > "one year ago"

Finally, parentheses may be used in conjunction with other filters to specify order of operation:

name: minutes AND description: "meeting minutes" OR NOT name: draft AND uploaded: "this month"

When searching using fields, remember:

  • Casing is not important
  • Partial word matches are supported, e.g. bus will match business
  • Keywords OR, AND, and NOT can be used between search terms to construct more specific searches
  • Multiple terms without keywords are considered as joined by OR
  • To match a phrase, speech marks should be used
  • Bounds can be searched using the < (less than) and > (greater than) symbols between the search field and value