sections in the article
This article explains the different ways you can search for product information in inriver.
Searching in inriver
To find products, you need to start with a search. The search capability in inriver is very fast, searching through large quantities of product data. The search provides instant suggestions of the top five most relevant results during the search process, giving users efficient tools for faster work.
Quick search
You can use the search field in the top navigation bar of the Web Portal to make a quick search in the system for entities that Start with e.g. a number or a letter or a word.
You can search for a specific entity by entering a number or name. Quick Search uses the display name and display description set for each EntityType. In addition to searching for one specific entity, in cases where you need to search for multiple unique entities simultaneously, you can make use of the multi-value search setting.
The Quick search provides instant suggestions of the top five most relevant results during the search process, giving users efficient tools for faster work.
There is also a possibility to utilize a series of wildcards in the Quick search:
- Search for anything that contains a word by using the % character before or after the search text, for example "%jacket". This will return both "Blue Jacket" and "Red Jacket".
- If you are unsure of the spelling, using _ in the search phrase will give you the alternatives, for example "gr_y" will return both gray and grey.
- You can also utilize brackets [] if you would like to be more specific in your wildcards. For example searching for "gr[ae]y" will give you any result containing either gray or grey. If you are not looking for any of those, you can instead search for "gr[^ae]y" to exclude a and e from the search - it would for example return gr3y and gr4y. Finally, it is also possible to use the brackets to search for a range, for example "gr[a-z]y" would return gray, grey, gruy but not gr3y and gr4y.
- The bracket search can also be used in case there are any DisplayNames or DisplayDescriptions containing underscore _ as a character. For example if you want to find item_A, the search phrase would be "item[_]A" to be precise. Searching for "item_A" would also return this, among for example itemBA, itemAA, itemXA.
Searching over system information
The search capability in inriver includes system information. With system information we mean the type of information that is not part of the data model (e.g. product-related entities) but which can be used for finding information about the following:
- System Id
- EntityType
- Fieldset
- Timestamp – Created, Last Modified
- User Entities – Created By, Modified By, Locked By
Query editor
inriver comes with a Query Editor feature, giving users the possibility to build complex and more exact searches. This includes searching over data conditions, links, completeness levels and specifications. You can also add, edit, and save searches and make them available to your colleagues.
The Query Editor uses the AND operator to join the query conditions, returning the entities that met ALL the conditions in the query.
Query Conditions
You can select an EntityType to search on and add conditions to your search by clicking the query conditions:
- Data Condition (additional data to search on for the EntityType)
- Relation Condition (e.g. Links to other Entities exist or don't exist)
- Completeness Condition (e.g. a specific Complenetess Group or Rule being complete or incomplete)
- Specification Condition (searches the Specification Template you define, and any Specifications fields in that Template)
Be specific
Queries should be narrowed down in order to make sense. The more specific your query, the faster the search, the more precise the result will be. The more generic your query, the larger the result, the slower the search will be. A query search result set with several hundreds or thousands of entries will be slow, difficult and impractical to work with. To achieve the best possible efficiency for your query-based search, narrow it down by adding several parameters.
To search using the query editor
- From the Dashboard go to Enrich, click the search icon with a + in the top navigation bar to open the Query Editor.
- Select an EntityType to search on and add conditions to your search by clicking the query conditions.
- Click Search with these criteria to see the search result of the query.
Click Save to save your query to a work area.
Click Notify me to create a task and to notification yourself.
Search on specifications
By using the Query Editor, you can use the extended search capabilities of inriver to search links, relations, detailed specifications and much more.
The Query Editor provides an easy way to add simple or complex queries to search any aspect of the specification data, providing a better overview and increased accessibility to specifications. This is especially useful when working with large numbers of attributes.
Notify me when
To support an efficient workflow, you can set a notification for when you need to take action on a particular query. You define the criteria by using the Query Editor, creating a notification for you when the exact criteria have been fulfilled. You can choose to be notified by email and/or by generating a new task.
If you want to set a notification, you need to limit your query. Notifications can only be set for queries with up to approximately four conditions, due to a character limitation in the database.
Search results: Card view
In Enrich, search results are displayed in a work area where the different entities appear as entity cards.
Search results: Table view
When working with several entities in a single work area it is sometimes useful to have them shown in a table view to get a better overview.
inriver gives you the option to toggle between showing products as product cards or as a table. The table view also adds the possibility to present, group, sort and select a set of entities from a list.
Using the group function, you simply drag and drop the field you want to group into the grouping area at the top of the table. From here it is also possible to sort the table by any field. It is also possible to select individual table rows as well as groups of rows from the table view.
Table view and card view in Enrich
Multi-select on a search result
It is possible to select a single entity, multiple entities, or all entities (check-box style) from a search result or a work area, and simply drag-and-drop the selected group into any destination - e.g. a new work area or a channel node for publishing to sales channels.
Video tutorial
Using multi-value search in the web portal
Using date intervals in the query editor
Learn more
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Comments
8 comments
Could you clarify in the Query editor section that OR search is not possible, only from the Remoting API?
Hi Tobias,
Thank you for the suggested improvement to the article. A clarification on the operator used by the Query Editor have now been added to the article.
How do you escape special characters like _ and # in the search result?
Hi Christian Christiansen. I have just tested searches for _, -, ! and #. All of these work without any need to escape the characters.
If you have a scenario where this doesn't work, please let us know.
I have a scenario where using "_" also returns results with "-" in the display name field.
Steve Vink Searching for the characters by itself is not a problem, but trying to search for entities with the string "_nn_" does not return correct results. There is plenty of "nn" in the results but not the correct ones where the "nn" is pre- and postfixed by an underscore. This goes for all combinations of special symbols and strings.
Underscore still seems impossible to search for, trying to find a field where the value contains _ but it always returns everything. Anyone got a clue on how to escape it?
If you want to query by underscore, you need to escape it like so:
This is likely because inriver is using MS SQL and using its LIKE operator to perform the query in the backend. If they are passing input pattern as is, then obviously _ would not work since it stands for any character. This is documented by Microsoft at LIKE (Transact-SQL) - Arguments.
The reason
%[_]works, is that:This should be documented here, because it is not that explicit, unless you have general understanding of databases and a hunch of how inriver has implemented certain things.
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