Question

Advanced Search to exclude all but one unique document for common field (ex. Student ID)

Search and Retrieval

Updated September 4, 2014

asked on September 3, 2014

Using Advanced Search Syntax is there a way to exclude all but one unique field return? (ex. Where {[Template Name]:[Field Name]="value"} equals {[Special Education]:[Student ID]="*"} is there an additional statement that can be added to "bring back only one document for each student id". We currently are not using linked documents.

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replied on September 4, 2014 • Show version history

Hey Cari,

In other words, lets assume that you have 10 documents in the repository with the field Student ID. 5 of them have Student ID "123" and the other 5 have Student ID "456". You're looking to configure a search such that only 2 documents are returned, one with Student ID 123 and the other with Student ID 456?

This is going to be tricky, because as long as the search criteria are met, Laserfiche will return those documents.

I think the best way to go about this is to find additional criteria to search for.

Example - Let's go back to the 10 document example I used above. Let's say that there is a "Document Type" field alongside the Student ID field. Each of the 5 documents with Student ID 123 have different Document Type fields. One Document Type may be transcript, another is Emergency Contact Info, etc. If you specify another criteria in your search such as Document Type and set that to a unique value, then theoretically, you'll only get one document per Student ID from that search.

Let's consider the case where you don't have any additional unique fields to search. We still might be able to create a workflow to identify a single document out of all that have the same student ID. For example, you can create a workflow that runs whenever a new document is added to the repository, and set up the workflow to search through the repository and determine whether there are other documents that have the same Student ID field. If so, end the workflow. If there are NOT any other documents in the repository with that Student ID field, you could set a tag or assign some identifier that is unique to one document per Student ID.

Hopefully that helps! Let me know if you'd like additional clarification or have any other questions!

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replied on September 4, 2014

Thanks Rob. I was hoping that there would be some Advanced Search Syntax that allows for excluding after first find on a given metadata field. In our case, we cannot isolate by doc type as a single document of any type is needed.

Curious though, Is what you are suggesting with WF the same process that would apply to Link documents? I saw some info on drawing a report of one of many linked documents. But, it appeared that there would be a work load on the front end to link the docs, and that linking may be for a different purpose.

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replied on September 4, 2014

Can you explain a little more about what you mean by "...a single document of any type is needed". Do you mean that if there's a Transcript and an Emergency Contact document, both with Student ID 123, you need to return them both?

I'm not sure exactly what information you may have seen, but if you link the article, I might be able to speak to it more effectively.

Linking documents may require a decent amount of work on the front end, depending on the number of links you need to create and the level of automation that's available. For example, it would be fairly simple to create a workflow that searches through the repository, finds all documents that have Student ID set to 123, and create links between those documents. If for some reason you can't use Workflow, then manually creating the links isn't hard, but like I said, depending on the number of links you need to create, it may take a while.

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Advanced Search to exclude all but one unique document for common field (ex. Student ID)

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