Published: 2003-06-24
Type: How to
More information
Content Studio exposes its full-text index via the Search Form and Search Result active scripting components. A full-text search will only return hits in categories that are marked as searchable. To mark a category to support full-text indexing you select the appropriate check box in the properties dialog for the category in question. Note that this property is not inherited by child categories and thus each category must be maintained separately. Also, in the administrative interface of the Search Result Active Scripting component, be sure to mark which unit(s) to search in.
Probably the most requested search conditions is one or more single words. Ex. silence gold will list documents that contains both the words in the example and they need not be next to each other but probably not to far apart either. The farther the words stand apart the lower the hit will be ranked. This is exactly the same as using the logical operator NEAR between the words. In addition to search for single words or combinations of single words you can search for exact phrases ex. "silence beets gold". To specify an exact phrase you include the phrase in double quotes as shown in the the example above. Note that any noise words within the phrase will be ignored (see the paragraph below).
Advanced search
The Content Studio full-text search active scripting component also supports the following advanced functionality.
| + (&) (AND) | Separate words with this operator if you would like the document to contain both the 2 expressions surrounding the operator. Ex gold + silent or gold AND silent . |
| - (AND NOT) | Use this operator between the words or the phrase to include the first but not the second expression. Ex. fire - "white smoke" finds documents that includes the word fire but not the phrase white smoke |
| * (wildcard) | The * wildcard can act as a replacement for zero or more characters within a single word. Ex. colo*r will find documents that contain both the words colour and color. This feature is especially useful when you would like to find forms of a word. Ex. to find all documents that contains words that starts with ins you can write ins*. The wildcard cannot be in the beginning of a word. |
| | (OR) | Separate words with this operator if you would like the document to contain either of the 2 words or expressions surrounding the operator. |
| () parentheses | Separate logical expressions within parentheses if you would like the expression to be evaluated first. After evaluating parenthesized groups, these rules apply when using these logical operators with search conditions:
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Issues with noise words
Many small words like is, a and to will not improve the full-text search in any way since they exist in almost any content. In order to prevent cluttering the full-text index with these meaningless words they are defined as noise words that will not be indexed. Also if you use any of these noise words in a search in Content Studio (ex. data is gold) no result will be returned. This is because this search actually is a search for three different words but since one of the is a noise word the search cannot be performed. However if you include all of the word between double quotes all documents with data and gold will be found but is will of course be ignored. For more information concerning noise words see the following article in the Microsoft MSDN library Full-text Index and Querying Concepts. By default Content Studio uses the language neutral word breaking algorithm and the Noise.dat noise-word file.