3.5 On searching in general

Search strings need to be entered frequently in the PVSR application in order to search by text or to filter the results. There are three types of searching methods:

• The quick-search field on the top of the page
• The complex search system, available - among others - from the Search menu item, on the On-demand report page and on some of the bulk configuration pages
• Any other searching or filtering in the Alarms/Measurements/Reports/Settings menus

In every case the application performs character based, case insensitive pattern matching. Four special characters can be used in the search string:

o   _ (underline) or ? (question mark):matches an arbitrary character

o   % (percentage) or * (asterisk): matches zero or more arbitrary characters

Therefore, the “_apple%” search string matches all names whose 2…6 characters are “apple” (regardless of the case of the letters), followed by an arbitrary string of characters, that is, “Xapple123”, “aApPle”, “1AppleTree”, etc.

With the exception of the quick-search functionality PVSR performs “whole text matching”, so neither of the results mentioned above would be matched with just “apple*” because they have some additional character at the beginning. However with the quick-search function PVSR looks only at the part of the string, i.e. if the user uses the search criteria “apple” with the quick search then PVSR will actually look for “*apple*”, except when the user explicitly uses the * character. This criteria is not very effective because of the first * character, so the user can change this in Settings => Customization => Preferences and remove the leading * with the “The quick search feature is looking for name prefix” option, so PVSR will only look for “apple*”. The user can also change there the object which are handled by the quick-search feature: by default it looks for normal or virtual sites and equipments and configuration submenus for administrators and only for normal sites and equipments and configuration submenus for non-administrators. Also by default the function is only searching by name, but on the preferences page the user can select any UDA to use as well. By clicking on a configuration submenu in the result list that submenu is displayed obviously under the Settings menu. For sites and equipments the object is displayed under the current menu for the Alarms, Measurements and Settings menu, while it is displayed under the Measurements menu for the Reports menu. For sites and equipments the result list contains two additional icons for opening the object under another menu.

Figure 6. Quick search result list

With the complex search system the user can search by using multiple search conditions, separaing them by space characters. Since the space character has this special meaning, the user may choose to enclose the search term with " if it contains spaces. If he doesn't then PVSR will automatically try the search with enclosing " characters as well. This means that if the search term is Apple Tree then the objects named Apple, Tree and Apple Tree will be also in the result list. Obviously this does not apply to the special search elements, like result:10, …

The difference between the complex search engines is mainly the object types for which the user can search. The Search submenu in the Settings has the most object types, while the engine on the On-demand report page has the least.

As mentioned in section 3.4 Using the display tabs, the user can also use the right and middle (wheel) mouse buttons and the Ctrl + left mouse button combination on the result links.

For additional information about the complex search engine refer to the 6.11 section.

The other search and filter fields uses also case insensitive searches, like the search engine above and the user can use both the _ (underline) or ? (question mark) character to match an arbitrary character, or use the % (percentage) or * (asterisk) to match any number of arbitrary characters. However in these cases the user cannot use any complex search criteria.

When not using the quick-search function one can also search/filter using regular expressions. For this option the search/filter must begin with the r= text, in which case the application interprets the text after the equal sign as a regular expression. For example string which contain the LAN text can be filtered with the normal expression “*LAN*” or with the regular expression criteria “r=.*LAN.*”