Searching for documents

Search for a document in a folder or library.

Document Manager provides users the ability to search for documents only within the working library, or across IBM WebSphere Portal. For more information on searching across the Portal, see Search. The Document Manager search function looks through folders for documents, but the search results will only include documents, not folders. Users can search Document Manager for documents based on the document content, author, or other document attributes. The basic search searches for documents only in the contents of the current folder using the default settings of that folder. To change the scope of the search, users can perform an advanced search.

Follow these steps to perform a basic Document Manager search:

  1. From the folder that you want to search in, type the keywords in the Search in current folder for field.

  2. Click the search icon to begin the basic search. The search results display at the bottom of the screen.

  3. Use the arrow buttons to navigate the search results pages.

When typing the keywords for the search, be sure to use a wildcard with partial strings. For example, a search for "HTML" and "HTM*" returns a file with the word "HTML" in the document. The same search with partial strings and no wildcard, such as "HTM", does not return that document.

Searches use:

  • Free text (users enter text or a phrase without any modifiers)

  • Internet-style plus ( +) and minus ( - ) symbols (+World +Wide +Web -spider searches only on "World Wide Web" and not "spider web")

  • Internet-style double quotes ( " ) for phrases ("World Wide Web")

  • Trailing wild cards (Adam* brings search results of Adam, Adams, Adamson, for example)

Viewing search results

By default, the maximum number of search results displayed is 200. When more than 200 items are returned by the search, a message is shown at the bottom of the results list to indicate that only the first 200 items were retrieved. If the item you are trying to find is not included in the results, try modifying our search criteria and performing the search again, or using the sort function to reorganize the results list.

We can increase the maximum number of search results that can be displayed in a single results list, but this may adversely affect server performance and result in longer wait times while performing searches. See Configuring the Document Manager portlet for information on changing the search results list maximum.

Performing an advanced Document Manager search

To perform an advanced search:

  1. Click Advanced Search.

  2. Type the keywords in the Search field.

  3. Select All folders to search all the folders in the working document library, or select Current folder and subfolders to only search for documents contained in the current folder.

  4. Select one of the following options from Include in search:

    • Document content and properties: This option searches the full text of the documents, as well as the document properties.

    • Document title: This option searches document titles.

    • Author: This option searches document authors. We can click Add to launch the People Picker to perform a directory search for names of authors.

    • Description: This option searches document descriptions.

  5. Select the document language from the Language of search string drop-down list to narrow the search to a certain document language. The language parameter is for informational purposes and searches and does not affect the content of the document.

  6. Click Search to begin the advanced search. The search results display at the bottom of the screen.

  7. Use the arrow buttons to navigate the search results pages.

 

Parent Topic

Working with documents

 

Related concepts



Search

 

Related tasks



Searching for a document library