Performing a Free-Form Search 

Use

You can perform a free-form search on any table.

Procedure

To start a free-form search:

       1.      Select the table you want to search. Free-Form Search always appears as the last search tab in the Search Parameters pane.

       2.      In the Free-Form Search tab, for the first field where you want to specify a search criterion, select an Operator from the drop-down list.

       3.      Type a value and press Enter, or tab away from the field to run the search. MDM displays the number of matching records on the status bar.

       4.      Repeat steps 2 and 3 for additional search criteria. Remember, you can get to a point where there are no matching records. If this occurs, reset some of the search selections, or reset the entire search to start from all the records by clicking on the Reset Search toolbar button, or choosing Search ® Reset Search from the main menu.

When you perform a free-form search on a text field using the starts with operator, the MDM Client performs an incremental search. With incremental search, each successive character you type narrows down the search results immediately as you type it, without waiting for you to press Enter. By contrast, all other data types and operators require that you press Enter before MDM performs the search.

Excludes search works by including results that have any values not in the exclude set. This means that if you have multiple values set for a field of a record, and you perform a search to exclude one of these values, you will still get that record because it contains the other value which is not in the excluded set.

When you add a free-form search criteria for a field, the MDM Client automatically: (1) makes the field visible in the Records grid; and (2) sorts by that column, if it is sortable.

When you perform a keyword search by entering one or more words into the Keyword searchcell, MDM treats each set of words separated by a semi-colon as an distinct search value. To get the overall search results, MDM ANDs together the search results of each individual word in a search value, and ORs together the search results for each search value. In this way, Keyword search acts like any other search dimension.