Wildcard characters

By default, ITSMA Service Management uses the question mark (?) as the wildcard that represents a single character, the asterisk (*) to represent multiple characters, and the backslash (\) as the escape character. Therefore, for a literal search on the * or ? character, you must immediately precede that character with a backslash (\), such as \?.

Note: You can modify the wildcard characters and the escape character by using the wildcardcharacters parameter in the Service Management server sm.ini file.

Example Scenario:

Suppose you want to find all records containing last names where the second character is'e'.

To search for any character followed by the letter e followed by the asterisk (*) character, you would type ?e\* in the Last Name field to generate alike query. Although the question mark (?) is a wildcard character, it verifies that the last name ends with a literal *.

The query would retrieve and display records with last names that begin with:

	Ae*
	ae*
	?e*
	*e*
	...