Fuzzy search is not applied to the notes field for two reasons:
1. notes are stored in HTML and enabling fuzzy searching there would cause wrong results because html tags would also be included in the search
2. performance: stripping the html tags for the fuzzy search is quite expensive and in larger documents a huge perf hit
Right now, we only apply fuzzy search to the name and URI field. We also tried to include fuzzy search for the description but this could also cause side effects and make it not very practical. Depending what you put into the description, it can make fuzzy search quite useless. To be honest, I'm not sure how we can provide better support for that without completely rewriting the filter logic.
Stefan, I was playing around with populating the notes field to include all the information I'd want to search, but it seems fuzzy search doesn't do what I thought it would do. Maybe I'm doing something wrong?
If I populate the notes field with the following as an example
nodename
datacenter
hardwaretype
I would expect to be able to search with something like this
"nodecentertype"
And have it return that item, but it doesn't. The only way I could use multiple strings from that field was if the only thing separating my queries was whitespace. Is that what's expected? Example, this worked.
"namedatacenterhardware"
Thanks Stefan. I understand. I'll play around with alternatives such as populating the notes field will all data we may want to search for. Appreciate the follow up.
Hi Ryan,
thanks for the explanation. I'm afraid this is currently not possible in the Navigation view. Implementing something like that is quite the effort and would require a lot of rewrite of the rendering/filtering logic. The folder dashboard is much more flexible and allows you to filter multiple columns (like in Excel) and is intended for more complex scenarios. I will keep this on the radar and keep this in mind should we work on the navigation filter again. Maybe we can get it in somehow.
Sorry to be the bearer of bad news.
Regards,
Stefan
Stefan,
The fuzzy search only works if the text is in the same field, example
Hostname: testing
Notes: somethingelse
If I search for "test" it'll match, if I search for "testthing" it doesn't. I'm trying to match multiple pieces of text from multiple fields.
Hi Ryan,
not sure I understand correctly. Do you want to search for multiple patterns in the name field, for example? If so, you could try fuzzy search which allows you to just search using multiple fragments of the text. Does that help?
Regards,
Stefan
ryan.flagler
Can a way be added to search for multiple patterns in the navigation filter? We have so many varying connections, it would be nice to define a delimiter and allow me to search for 2 text values to increase filtering to a more useful level.