Searching the Help
To search for information in the Help, type a word or phrase in the Search box. When you enter a group of words, OR is inferred. You can use Boolean operators to refine your search.
Results returned are case insensitive. However, results ranking takes case into account and assigns higher scores to case matches. Therefore, a search for "cats" followed by a search for "Cats" would return the same number of Help topics, but the order in which the topics are listed would be different.
Words and Phrases
| Search for | Example | Results |
|---|---|---|
| A single word | cat
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Topics that contain the word "cat". You will also find its grammatical variations, such as "cats". |
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A phrase. You can specify that the search results contain a specific phrase. |
"cat food" (quotation marks) |
Topics that contain the literal phrase "cat food" and all its grammatical variations. Without the quotation marks, the query is equivalent to specifying an OR operator, which finds topics with one of the individual words instead of the phrase. |
Using Boolean Operators
| Search for | Operator | Example |
|---|---|---|
|
Two or more words in the same topic |
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| Either word in a topic |
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| Topics that do not contain a specific word or phrase |
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| Topics that contain one string and do not contain another | ^ (caret) |
cat ^ mouse
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| A combination of search types | ( ) parentheses |
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- Form tailoring
- What is a form?
- Form tailoring use cases
- Selecting values from options in a control
- Selecting values from options on a form
- Changing the options available based on prior user input
- Displaying related data
- Grouping related controls
- Typing text into a control
- Managing global lists
- Reducing upgrade conflicts
Managing global lists
Global lists provide an efficient way to display frequently-used list values by storing the list in system memory as a global variable. All applications can access the global list variable as needed without needing to query the database each time a control needs to display the list. However, the more items there are in a global list, the more costly the list is to system performance.
A global list has the following performance benefits.
- Since a global list is stored in system memory, there is no need to query the back-end database for a list of values. Using a global list therefore reduces the amount of input and output traffic to the RDBMS.
- Since a global list is available to all users logged into the system, there is no need to create conditional queries to grant access to the information. Using a global list therefore potentially reduces the number of queries needed to access a particular set of information.
When managing global list, keep in mind the following performance costs.
- The server must send the entire list to the client each time the form is displayed. The more list items there are, the more network bandwidth it takes to transmit the list to the client.
- The more users there are who can access the global list, the more often the server has to transmit the list to clients.
- The server must periodically rebuild the list of values. The more items there are in the list, the more system resources it takes to rebuild the list
If you want to maximize your system performance, use the following guidelines to determine when to use global lists.
If there are a small number of options to choose from (for example, 32 or less options), then displaying a global list in a Combo Box control is typically the most efficient strategy. Since the list of options is small, you gain a performance improvement by skipping a query to the back-end database that a Comfill control would require. See Combo Box.
If there are large number of options to choose from (for example, 100 or more options), then displaying a list of values from a Comfill control linked to other records in the database is typically more efficient than a global list. Since a global list must always send the entire list of options to the client, the Comfill control has better performance because it can send one page worth of options to the client at a time. In addition, it is more efficient to add, update, or remove the related records a Comfill displays than it is to rebuild an entire global list each time you want to modify the list of values. See Comfill.
Related concepts
