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Search

When viewing a number of items in List, Grid and other collection views, the Collection Toolbar is displayed above the view, which includes a Search input.

Collection Toolbar

Keyword Search

Enter one or more simple keywords separated by spaces to perform a case-insensitive keyword search.  Items in the collection view below will be filtered to only include those that match at least one of the keywords.

Items will rank higher and therefore appear first when they item is a stronger match.  For example, if the keywords appear in the item Summary (title that appears in List View) in the exact order they were entered, it will be a stronger match.  An item will also be a stronger match if all keywords match, and if they appear more frequently and/or together in the text where they appear.

By default, all alpha-numeric text in any text or number field within an item and the items they contain will be matched in a keyword search.  However, content types may be customized by administrators to limit or alter what text is available to match in a keyword search (see Keywords Template).

Advanced Search

In addition to simple keywords, the search input also recognizes cPath Filters, which offers more precise ways to search on specific fields.  It does require some technical knowledge to use though.  A cPath Filter is a query expression that can look like the following examples.

Match items where the Title field equals (exact case-sensitive match) the text "TEST".

[Title = "TEST"]

As an alternative to =, the LIKE comparison operator can also be used for the same purpose.

[Title LIKE "TEST"]

However, LIKE will also recognize the special character '%' that will match on any string of characters, and '_' that will match on any single character.  So, the following example will match items where the Title field starts with the text "TEST".

[Title LIKE "TEST%"]

LIKE is case-sensitive, so the example above will only match on all-uppercase "TEST".  ILIKE can be used to do a case-insensitive match, so the following example will match items where the Title field starts with the text "TEST", "test", "Test", "TesT" and so on.

[Title ILIKE "test%"]

Multiple comparisons can be combined with logical operators AND and OR to match on multiple fields.  The following example will match items where the Title field starts with the text "test" (case insensitive) and the Description field ends with the text "testing." (case insensitive).

[Title ILIKE "test%" AND Description ILIKE "%testing."]

It is also possible to search on all keywords in a cPath Filter using MATCHES().  The following example will match items where the Title field starts with the text "test" (case insensitive) and keywords in any field match "apple" or "pear".

[Title ILIKE "test%" AND MATCHES(.Keywords(),"apple pear")]
That covers the basics, but many more options are available to perform just about any search you can think of.  To learn more, see cPath Filters.