Using the Search Function

The Survey Search functionality uses a Lucene™ full-text search engine that allows you to search for projects and nodes in projects that contain specific words. Once you have added the search criteria, the search is conducted through all surveys to which you have access, and a list of the "hits" is presented.

Click the Search icon that is located in the upper-right corners of the Home window and the Survey List window - . The filter panel opens - .

Figure 1 - The survey Search icon

Figure 2 - The filter panel

Type into the text field the question or node id or specific words that you know are included somewhere in the question or node that you are looking for. This could be for example an answer option, a word in the question text etc. you can use Boolean operators, wildcards, fuzzy and proximity searches - see below. Type in or select from drop-down lists any other search criteria to assist you with finding the survey you are looking for, then click the Search button to open a list of the surveys to which you have access, that contain the specified question, text etc. - .

Figure 3 - Example of a hit list resulting from a search

Boolean operators

You can refine the search by adding Boolean operators to the search field. The operators supported are and, or, not, + and -, and you type these between the words you are looking for. For example typing gender and please will find all nodes with both the words gender and please somewhere in the node. The or operator is the default conjunction operator. This means that if there is no Boolean operator between two terms, the or operator is used. The or operator links two terms and finds a matching survey if either of the terms exist. The symbol || can be used in place of the word or.

Wildcard searches

You can perform single and multiple character wildcard searches within single terms. To perform a single character wildcard search use the ? symbol. The single character wildcard search looks for terms that match that with the single character replaced. For example, to search for text or test you can use the search te?t. To perform a multiple character wildcard search use the * symbol. Multiple character wildcard searches look for 0 or more characters. For example, to search for test, tests or tester, you can use the search test*. You can also use the wildcard searches in the middle of a term, such as te*t.

Note that you cannot use a * or ? character as the first character in the text field.

Fuzzy searches

You can perform "fuzzy" searches based on the Levenshtein Distance, or Edit Distance algorithm. To do a fuzzy search use the tilde, "~", symbol at the end of a Single word term. For example to search for a term similar in spelling to roam use the fuzzy search roam~. This will find terms like foam and roams.

Proximity Searches

You can find words that are within a specific distance away from each other. To conduct a proximity search use the tilde, "~", symbol at the end of a phrase. For example to search for instances where near and far are within 10 words of each other in a survey, use the search term near far~10.

Hit list tools and options

Each hit in the list has a number of options available depending on the type of hit:

• Click the survey ID link for a hit to open the Survey Management page for that survey.
• Click on the highlighted text in a hit to open a drop-down menu:
• Preview - opens the preview page for that node.
• Add this question... - if you have a survey open, this option copies the question into the current survey.
• Edit node - opens the survey that the question is in, and opens the Question Details page for that node.
• Click the Activities icon for a hit to open a drop-down menu with items relevant to the type of hit (survey or node):
• Edit survey - opens the survey that the question is in, at the Survey Designer page.
• Survey management - opens the survey that the question is in, at the Survey Overview page.
• Duplicate survey - creates a duplicate of the survey that the question is in, and opens the new survey at the Survey Overview page.
• Preview - opens the preview page for that node.
• Set as secondary project - if you have a survey open then this adds the survey in the hit list to the currently open survey as a secondary project.
• Edit node - opens the survey that the question is in, and opens the Question Details page for that node.

Note: This search facility does not find archived surveys (go to About Archiving for more information).

Click the Search icon again to close the filter panel.

Survey and Panel Search

You can search for existing Surveys, Panels, and Tasks. The Survey and Panel search lists function in the same way and have similar search options. Note that the Task search list is slightly different (go to Task Management Overview for more information).

The picture below shows the Survey search list (click the Surveys button in the main toolbar, or go to the Home > Surveys menu command):

Figure 4 - Example of a Search list

The fields across the top of the list allow you to search by Survey ID, Survey Name, owner Company, the Creator of the survey, by report creation date in “Created”, by Keywords and by Status. When searching by Status, if Maintenance mode is selected, the status in the survey list will be the status that was selected before Maintenance mode was selected.

Note that when searching, a wildcard is automatically added after the text you enter, but not before.

• For creation dates ("Created"), you can select operators: Less than, less than or equal to, equal to, greater than, and greater than or equal to.
• Your search can produce several active links as shown in the example above. Click on a blue Survey ID link to go to open that survey and go to its Overview page. If you move the mouse pointer over a Survey ID link and click on the drop-down button that appears to the right of the link, the survey menu will be displayed. Overview opens the Survey Overview page, Designer opens the Survey Designer where you can edit the Survey, and Add to Favorites adds the survey to the Favorites list.
• If your search returns more items than can fit on one page, use the Back and Next page arrows to switch between pages and browse through the list. The default number of items displayed is set to 50.
• In this list, you can also check one or more items and delete them by clicking the Delete button at the top of the list. To select all, check the checkbox at the top of the list, next to “Survey ID.”
• You can also move several surveys simultaneously to the Favorite surveys lists. To do this, check the checkbox next to the desired surveys and click Add to Favorites. To select all, check the checkbox at the top of the list, next to “Survey ID.”
• To sort the list by one of the columns, click on the column header. An arrow will indicate in which direction the list is sorted, ascending or descending.
• Click on the alphabet buttons in the lower frame of the window to list only those surveys for which the name starts with the selected letter.
• In the Survey Category drop-down you can select the category of the displayed surveys. The default value is Normal, which means that ordinary surveys will be displayed. The other options are: All, Template, Benchmark, and Library.
• The surveys that are marked with category Library will usually be surveys that you wish to keep for later reference.
• The surveys that belong to the category Template are specially marked Library items. They will be available when you create new surveys and choose to base a new survey on an existing survey template when you have to specify the survey name. Surveys that you want to store for later reuse can be stored in Library category. The surveys that belong to the Benchmark category will usually be surveys that you set up for reporting purposes in Reportal.
• Click Reset to clear the search criteria and present the entire list.