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Question

Question

Laserfiche 10 FIELD Searching Issues

asked on April 29, 2016

Laserfiche,

FYI, I have had fields searching issues with one of our customers after upgrading from v9 to v10. I have confirmed that the FIELD search functions differently in WebAccess v9 than v10.  So it now seems that we have lost individual FIELD search functionality after upgrading our customer from WebAccess v9 to v10.

Here are screenshots of an individual FIELD search in both WebAcess v9.2.1.673 and v10.0.0.994 with different results:

 

6 documents in the v10 repository with the following field info...

 

 

Searching for block "7" in a FIELD(s) search produces NO RESULTS...

 

 

Same 6 documents in a v9 repository with the same field info... 

 

Searching for block "7" in a FIELD(s) search produces 5 documents (as it should)...

 

 

Please let me know how we can resolve this issue ASAP.

Thanks,

Ali

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Answer

APPROVED ANSWER
replied on April 29, 2016

The search being run in Web Access 10 is specifically looking for documents that have the "Lot" field with the value "7" and the other Fields with no value. Because the other documents have a value for "Qualifier" and "Block" it's not returning those documents. I assume it's not returning the "00-1934 (5)" document because it has a value in the "Address" field.

In Web Access 9.2, it was just ignoring the independent fields that didn't have a value and wasn't including that in the search. The reason for the change in Web Access 10 was to match the behavior in the Client, to keep things consistent.

For something like this, perhaps using saved searches would be the better approach.

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Replies

replied on April 29, 2016

So your users are picking the individual fields one at a time instead of selecting the template?  Instead of selecting the fields why not pick the template and search across those fields?

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replied on April 29, 2016

Customer has multiple document types (with different templates) which are searched using one unique block/lot, so using a TEMPLATE search isn't feasible. 

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replied on April 29, 2016

I had a similar issue after upgrading to LF10 but using the desktop client. It seemed to be related to the search field being indexed but we found that the advanced/syntax search did return the correct results.

It seemed to correct it itself but we did ultimately remove the index from the field as it slowed performance.

See https://answers.laserfiche.com/questions/96209/Template-Search-101-Issue

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replied on April 29, 2016

All of the fields in the repository are not indexed... 

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APPROVED ANSWER
replied on April 29, 2016

The search being run in Web Access 10 is specifically looking for documents that have the "Lot" field with the value "7" and the other Fields with no value. Because the other documents have a value for "Qualifier" and "Block" it's not returning those documents. I assume it's not returning the "00-1934 (5)" document because it has a value in the "Address" field.

In Web Access 9.2, it was just ignoring the independent fields that didn't have a value and wasn't including that in the search. The reason for the change in Web Access 10 was to match the behavior in the Client, to keep things consistent.

For something like this, perhaps using saved searches would be the better approach.

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replied on April 29, 2016

Alex,

So this was changed purposely in WebAccess 10? Is there anyway development would consider making this a search option where you could ignore fields which have no value? 

Am I correct in stating that a "workaround" would be populating all empty fields with lets say "000", then perform an independent field search and use wildcards "*"...

ADDRESS *

BLOCK *

LOT 7

QUALIFIER *

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replied on April 29, 2016

That's one way to workaround it for now. However, I'll file an enhancement request to have some way of toggling between the two modes, where you want to explicitly search for blank fields or you want to ignore blank fields.

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replied on April 29, 2016

Thanks Alex...

Yes, please file this request ASAP.

This is critical in the way our municipality customers perform searches and this particular customer is now requesting that we rollback to WebAccess version 9.

 

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replied on April 29, 2016

In Web Access 9.2, it was just ignoring the independent fields that didn't have a value and wasn't including that in the search. The reason for the change in Web Access 10 was to match the behavior in the Client, to keep things consistent.

Since in 9.2 these documents are being returned even though these blank fields are ignored completely, you should just be able to remove these fields from your search and get the same list of results.

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replied on April 29, 2016 Show version history

Hi Ali,

As I previously noted in the first copy of this post, it would help a lot to have a specific use case of why the customer needs to search in this manner, instead of simply 'they are insisting on it', especially since this change added oft-requested functionality already in the Client that you couldn't previously easily do in Web Access. We'll look into it given that it's a behavioral change, but as Brianna notes it'll actually be less work for them to simply not include those other fields in the first place. 

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replied on April 29, 2016

Justin,

These municipality users are accustomed to searching on ADDRESS, BLOCK, LOT, QUALIFIER on a daily basis. They want to see these fields and type whatever information they have, be it an ADDRESS or just a BLOCK/LOT. They don't want to add/remove independent search fields every time they perform a search (or even use the saved search feature) -- its just not very efficient as this would introduce extra clicks.

Bottom line is (and I totally agree with the customer), is that, this search change was introduced in WebAccess 10 and they feel as though its a step backwards in how they go about their daily business practices. Wherein, WebAccess v9 the individual field search worked in a much more efficient manner to them, as they could input (or not input) information in any field and get results.

So the customer (and I see their point), would like to rollback to WebAccess v9.

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replied on April 29, 2016

Thanks for the use case Ali, that helps clarify the request/user need here. We'll look into adding a way to force this behavior, perhaps an organization-wide attribute. 

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replied on April 29, 2016

Thank you... please keep me updated.

Ali

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replied on August 30, 2016

Has there been any movement on this?  We are in the process of upgrading to 10.1 and this has been identified as a major issues for our dev testing users.

 

 

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replied on August 31, 2016

I haven't heard any updates.... I really hope Laserfiche addresses this issue.

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replied on May 11, 2018 Show version history

What is the status of this? This is something our users need. 

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replied on May 11, 2018

This change in behavior is due to a change in functionality of the server.  For years people have requested that blank independent fields be allowed to be added to entries.  LFS now allows you to do that.  But when searching, you can search for fields that are blank by adding them in the field search with no value.  So now if you have a search with multiple independent fields (rather than a template), if you leave a value blank, instead of ignoring it as it did in previous versions (because blank independent fields were not allowed), it now searches for any (including blank) value you specify.  So now, if you want to search for just 1 value, you must remove the other independent fields from the search.  This is not a bug, but a behavior change to match the functionality change of the server.

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replied on May 11, 2018

I understand that Bert, but try and explain that to a group of users who look at this as a step backwards. Asking them to add / remove fields values when they are doing 100+ searches a day simply doesn't work in our environment. They now look at Laserfiche like an inferior product compared to our previous system. 

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replied on May 11, 2018

How would I do a SINGLE search on the following:

 

I need to find all the students with the last name of smith with a first name that starts with any letter, with this student ID value, and this SSN value. 

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replied on May 11, 2018

You can put a * in the field to indicate any character. 

You can also now in Laserfiche 10.3 pre-create saved search definitions and push them out to specific groups or everyone in the organization such that they can load the saved searches and have all the fields already listed and (if desired) filled out with initial information. 

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