Drilldown Search versus Free-Form Search 

There are two types of search in the MDM Client, as described in the following sections and as illustrated in the figure below.

Drilldown Search

With drilldown search, you can make selections from each search tab, where each tab corresponds to a lookup field in the table (such as Manufacturer or Category). You can also make selections for each of the attributes linked to the selected category, and each of the qualifiers of a qualified table record. You can make selections in any order, to constrain the search results and converge on one or more products, and you can also remove search selections in any order to expand the set of search results and find similar products.

At each step along the way, the system narrows down the choice of values for each search dimension to show only those that are valid given the current result set based on the previous search selections. This is known as limiting and guarantees that you can never go down a dead-end path. For example, if you select Chain Saws in the Category tab, and then open the Manufacturertab, only the manufacturers of chain saws will be listed. (The specific names of tables and search tabs may be different in your particular repository). The result is an extremely flexible and powerful search capability, delivered through an exceptionally smooth and intuitive process.

Limiting makes it easy to detect errors in your master data, when values that should not be part of the search results show up in the limited list of existing field or attribute values.

 

Free-Form Search

With free-form search, you can perform searches on any field that does not lookup its values from a subtable. Free-form search also allows you to do “fuzzy” searches with a variety of search operators; however, the down side of this approach is that you can also end up with no matching records, which cannot happen with drilldown search.

Drilldown Search Use the search tabs in the Search Parameters pane to select values for each search dimension (lookup field), one after another, to progressively narrow the set of matching records until you arrive at exactly those you want to view. There is a Search Parameter tab for each field in the current table whose values are a lookup into a subtable. If you select a taxonomy field (such as Category in the example below), you can also select values for each of the attributes that are linked to the selected category.

Free-Form Search The last tab of the Search Parameters pane does not correspond to a table field and is labeled Free-Form Search. Use it to search on all of the fields that are not lookups (and on which you can therefore not perform drilldown search). With free-form search, you perform searches using operators such as contains, starts with, is greater than, is NULL, and so on, on one or more of the fields listed in the grid.

You can save searches for later reuse, either as named searches (in the Named Searches table) or local searches (in the file system) using the Named Search and Local Search main menu commands, respectively.