How To: Utilizing Search Capabilities
From jVantage
Contents |
Telling jVantage What to Search For
jVantage automatically provides search capability support for your applications. As you create applications, you can specify which fields of your application entities have relevance in terms of searching.
There are two aspects to how a field can be relevant.
First, for example, if you have a contact management application that contains information about people you know, you may want to search for individuals based on part of their phone number, part of an address, a name or an e-mail address. But, other information about the person may not necessarily be useful for searching, such as fax number or ZIP code or eye color (if you should happen to have eye color in your application). You can tell jVantage which fields in your application are relevant for searching and which aren't. There are at least two reasons for narrowing the fields of your entities in this way. One is that by telling jVantage which fields are relevant you are also telling jVantage which fields are not relevant. This helps jVantage optimize searches.Second, eliminating irrelevant information can make your searches, and those of your users, more accurate.
The second aspect of field configuration is to declare which fields from your entities should be displayed when a user's search criteria is matched. If someone performs a search in your contact management application based on e-mail address, when a match is found the user will probably expect to see the contact name in the search result list. They will probably also expect to see other relevant information such as phone numbers and maybe an e-mail address. If they should happen to want to see more information about the contact, which is not displayed in the search result list, they can click on the user in the list and be taken to the full view of the contact record.
What Determines if an Entity is Searchable?
An entity is searchable only if it contains fields, or attributes, that have been marked as searchable. For example, if you are trying to search for an Associate by name you can go down to the bottom of the screen inside your application and select Associate in the key word drop down box and then type in the name of the Associate you are trying to find information on in the adjacent search box. In order for jVantage to have something to compare the search with to get results for your search, the corresponding attributes of the enity you are searching must be selected.To Select the necessary attributes for your search, go to the Actions tab on the left side(shown above) of the screen and from there click on the Set Field Properties tab. By doing so you are taken to the Set Field Properties page where you can click on the necessary attributes for your search entity (shown Below). For associates one might select the name, phone number, and e-mail attributes to make the the information needed to search an associate searchable.
Selecting Fields to Display in the Search Results
All of this information can be specified from the Actions | Field Properties option of the table definition action menu. This tool displays all of the fields that are associated with the current entity. The right most column on the list is called is searchable. Place a check mark on each field row that you would like to be searched for a match against user search criteria. When a match is found, the descriptive name is automatically displayed in the search result list as the primary piece of information about the entity. Beyond the descriptive name, a short description and supplemental field can also be specified. These additional fields will accompany the descriptive name in the search result list.
Notice the add form initial focus and modified form initial focus columns. These allow developers to specify the fields that should have initial focus when a entity instances are created or modified. These modifiers are not relevant searching.
Another option available is the not shown option located below the table in the short description and supplemental columns. By selecting this option in either or both columns you are telling jVantage not to include those fields in the results list. If when accumulating information about a subject you find that the two remaining fields are unnecessary you may select the not shown option to give your table a cleaner and more sensible look rather than repeating information already listed or having left empty fields.
Rebuilding Search Tables
If you change the search configuration via the Set Field Properties page jVantage will need to rebuild the search indexes to reflect those changes. You will only want to rebuild your search tables after you are finished with all of your changes.
