SEARCHING: Grouping Syntax and Queries

BI24 supports using parentheses to group clauses to form sub queries. This can be very useful if you want to control the Boolean logic for a query.

To search for either “beef” or “chicken” and “London”, use the query:

This eliminates any confusion and makes sure you that “London” must exist and either term “chicken” or “beef” may exist.

SEARCHING: Range Searches

Range searches allow you to match documents whose field(s) values are between the lower and upper value specified by the range search. Range searches can be inclusive or exclusive of the upper and lower bounds. Sorting is done alphabetically.

Using square brackets performs inclusive range searches:

This will find documents whose “Branch Name” field has values between “Bristol” and “Chester” inclusive.

Using curly brackets performs exclusive range searches:

This will find all documents whose “description” fields have values between “Bristol” and “Chester”, but not including “Bristol” and “Chester”.

SEARCHING: Proximity Searches

You can use BI24 to find words that are separated by a specific number of words in a document. To do this, type the tilde (“~”) symbol at the end of a phrase followed by the number of words that separate those two words.

For example to search for a “Thin” and “Pizza” within 4 words of each other in a document use the search:

Results:

SEARCHING: Fuzzy Searches

BI24 enables you to do fuzzy searches by typing the tilde (“~”) symbol at the end of a single word term. For example to search for a term similar in spelling to “hip” use the fuzzy search hip~

This search will find terms like hop and ship.

SEARCHING: Wild Card Searches

BI24 supports single and multiple character wild card searches;

? Symbol for a single character wildcard search.

* Symbol for a multiple character wildcard search.

The single character wild card search looks to replace the wild card character with a single character in the search string. For example, if you wanted to find records for postcode sub areas ‘BS1 3EZ’ and ‘BS1 3ET’, you could enter for BS1 3E?

Multiple character wild card searches look to replace the wild card character with zero or more characters in the search string. For example, if you wanted to find records for the branches ‘Falkirk’ and ‘Falmouth’, you could enter for Fal*

The results returned are;

SEARCHING: Combining Search Terms

Combining search terms will provide you with a more focused set of results. – For example if you want to find the Chicken products in Birmingham, you could enter chicken birmingham:

Any records that contain the word ‘Chicken’ AND ‘Birmingham’ in any column or field will be returned and BI24 will highlight where a match is made in the record.

If you want to have the combined search term preference changed to find ‘Any’ terms (OR) rather than ‘All’ terms (AND), see Section 11 on Setting BI24 Preferences.

SEARCHING: Exact Match

Entering the exact name of the item you want to search for is an obvious place to start. For example if you’re looking for information about chicken products, type chicken in the search field then click the Search button:

Any records that contain the word ‘chicken’ in any column or field will be returned and BI24 will highlight where a match is made in the record.