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.
Search for | Example | Results |
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A single word | cat
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Topics that contain the word "cat". You will also find its grammatical variations, such as "cats". |
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. |
Search for | Operator | Example |
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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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Wildcard characters
By default, Service Manager 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 Manager 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* ...
Related topics
Logical operators
Relational operators
Use like queries to search for a string of characters
Use the index function in a query