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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Variable usage and null values
Anytime you use a custom variable in query you should ensure that it does not have a null value. Null values in query variables can cause full table scans which lower your system's performance.You can avoid null values in custom variables by using the following methods:
- Use the nullsub() function to replace the null value with a default value.
- Replace a custom variable with system variable. System variables obtain a value when a user logs in to the system or accesses a particular application.
For example,suppose you create a custom variable $name to store a contact's name. You could provide a default value for the variable with the following expression.
$name=nullsub($name, contact.name in $L.file)
In this case, the default value will become the contact name listed in any file that uses this contact.name field. If query does not have access to the contact.name field value, you may consider hard-coding the default value, but the utility of such a hard-coded value may be limited.
Alternatively, you may want to use an existing system variable such as $lo.user.name or $lo.ufname to provide the name of current operator.
Related concepts
