Using Free text search

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You can use the Free text search feature through the Product Master interface.

Before you begin

  • Enable Free text search feature from the Settings > Application settings page of the Persona-based UI. For more information, see Free Text Search settings.
  • Ensure that the account that you have configured for the Free text search meets the following requirements :
    • The account should have the Full Admin role.
    • The Full Admin role should have full access to all the catalogs that are to be indexed. Access can be given by modifying the ACG associated with the catalog to select the Full Admin role and grant all permissions on all the catalogs for the Full Admin role.

Procedure

  • Go to the Upper-right corner > icon.
  • Select New or Saved to create a new Free text search or use an existing saved Free text search.
  • Select Catalog or Hierarchy.
  • Specify the catalog or hierarchy from the drop-down list.
  • In the Search field, specify the search keyword. For a simple plain text search, you can further select and specify either And or OR operator.
  • Optional: To further refine your search, click Additional criteria section to display the Select category dialog. Specify categories by either of the following methods. Click to clear all the selected categories.
    • Click to open Select category pop-up window. Select an appropriate Hierarchy from the list. Click and OK to select appropriate categories.
    • In the Select category dialog, enter the first 3 characters of a category name to display a category.
      Note:
      • To enable the feature, set the value of the allowTypeAhead property under categorySelector property in the config.json file to true.
      • You can configure the minimum number of characters you must enter by changing the value of the minTypeAheadLength property under categorySelector property in the config.json file. By default, the value is 3.
      • If the value of the category_path_separator property in the common.properties file is ~(Tilde), you cannot search items. This is a known limitation and will be fixed with a future release.
  • Optional: Click Save your search filter criteria to save the criteria you have specified to easily access later.
  • Optional: Catalog: To refine the search results, click Column filter section to display the Select attribute collection field. Click to open Attribute collection pop-up window. Select the appropriate attribute collection, and click OK. Click to clear all the selected attribute collections.
  • Fix Pack 3 Select NLP search to enable fetching search results by using Natural Language Processing (NLP). In the search input text field, specify an NLP query.

    Examples

    Fetch me a list of all the employees who live in the CA city and belong to the IT department.
    Fetch me a list of all the Coffee brands that have Decaf options.
    Fetch me a list of all the Televion models that have 4K Ultra HD resolution and a size of 55 inches.
    Important: Ensure that you have completed the Configuring Natural Language Processing (NLP) search.
  • Click Search. The right pane is populated with free text search results depending on your specified criteria. You can perform the following tasks on the results.

    Fix Pack 2 You can configure the maximum number of search results that are displayed through the max_fts_result_window property in the restConfig.properties file. For more information, see restConfig.properties file parameters.

    Fix Pack 3 NLP search feature: You can only perform Open (You can open only items belonging to the same container name), Refresh, and Export to excel tasks.

    Table 1. Tasks of the FTS page
    Icon Description
    Open Select entries and click to open the entry details page.
    Refresh Click to refresh the page.
    Checkout Click to check out the selected item. The single-edit page opens to display the item details in an editable mode. The icon signifies that the entry is checked out.
    Important: Select Checkout and Edit checkbox while you are creating a collaboration area to enable the Checkout functionality.
    Save as list Click to open Save as list pop-up window. Enter an appropriate name in the List name field, and click Apply. You can access this saved list anytime through the Search > Products > List page.
    Generate report Catalog, Categories, Subcategories

    Click to export search results to a Microsoft™ Excel format. In the Generate report pop-up window, select the appropriate script, and click OK. All the records get downloaded in the generated report irrespective of the selection in the multi-edit page.

    You can either choose Default Rich Search Results Report Script (Excel 2007 - xlsx format) or Default Rich Search Results Report Script (2021).

    You can specify the value for the maximum number of entries that a report can have through the following. You can also specify the value as No limit.
    • Admin UI - Home > My Settings > Specific Screen Settings > Maximum number of entries to be written to a report on Generate Report in Multi Edit
    • Persona-based UI - Settings > Personal settings > Generate maximum entries report
    Note: The generated report contains the PRIMARY_SPEC details only.
    Click Run as background in the Generate report pop-up window to run the generate report in the background. You can download this report from the Home page > Show notifications > click Generate report job > Job details > Download report. You can also download this report from the Job manager > Job console > Generate report jobs page. Click Result for this report to download the report. For more information, see Generate report jobs.
    Important: Generate reports are shown for catalogs that have catalog_list permission of the USER ACG and the hierarchies that have hierarchy_list permission of USER ACG.

    Fix Pack 2

    • You can generate a report for only the selected attributes, columns, and rows.
      • Enable the feature by Settings > Personal settings > Enable Generate report - Selected rows/columns.
      • Specify Default Rich Search Results Report Script (Excel 2007 - xlsx format) or Rich Search Results Report Script (2021 format) as the script.
    • If you enable the feature, but specify no items, all the items get exported.
    • To exclude the categories mapped to the items from getting exported to the Microsoft Excel workbook, configure the export_item_category_mapping property as false in the common.properties file. For more information, see common.properties file parameters.
    Actions Catalog
    Select an item, and click to perform a preconfigured entry preview script.
    Note: The Actions icon is only displayed if the entry preview script is configured for the selected catalog or container.
    Clear search Click to undo the search results and reset the search field.
    Publish Click to publish any of the following from the IBM® Product Master.
    Categorize

    Click to open the Categorization pop-up window. The left pane displays categories for the selected hierarchy in a tree format. Select to categorize multiple entries. Click to map the selected categories to the entry.

    Fix Pack 2

    Data explorer, Free text search, Search

    • Select an entry to enable the icon.
    • You need to have recategorize items under the Catalog permission selected in the Admin UI.
    • If you select a single entry, you can view existing mapped categories and remove the categorization, if needed (Not supported if the Secondary spec has mandatory attributes).
    • Product Family: You can only use this feature on a Simple item.
    • If the selected entries are checked out, you cannot categorize them.
    • If the selected category in the tree has mandatory secondary attributes, you cannot categorize them.
    • Click Save and Close to automatically close the Categorization pop-up window, update the categories, and refresh the page.

    Collaboration area

    Important: Displayed only if the All Re-categorization is selected for a step.
    Checkout family

    Product Family feature

    Select an item and click to check out all the Product Family items (Base, Variant, and Simple) to a specific Product Family collaboration area.

    Compact view Click to see the search results displayed as a compact or tabular view.
    Filter a column Click and in the pop-up window,
    • Enter a filter search criterion in the Search field, and click Apply.
    • Data explorer, Collaboration area, and Search pages

      GA

      You can use Pipe (|) to add multiple filter keywords.
      • Following is the behavior for the supported attribute types.
        • Currency - Exact match
        • Integer - Exact match
        • Lookup - Contains match
        • Number - Exact match
        • Number enumeration - Exact match
        • Sequence - Exact match
        • String - Contains match
        • String enumeration - Contains match
        Attention: Do not use only Pipe (|) in the Filter field, else the application will throw an error message.
      • Lookup type of attribute
        Collaboration area and Data explorer pages
        You can search based on primary key, display attribute, or both, depending on the set display format (Search what you can view).
        Search page
        Every keyword that is separated by Pipe (|) should have a minimum of 3 characters.

    • You can also filter the Localized String attribute and the String attribute in Grouping by using this.

    • Sort the values depending upon your requirement, click (Ascending or Descending). The default value is ascending order.
    • Click a column header to sort the values.
    • Drag column headers to group the details.
    Manage Attributes Using the Manage Attributes feature, you can choose and view only the required attributes in the Multi-edit, Data explorer, Search, Free text search, and Audit History dashboard pages. Click on the right side to open the Manage Attributes pop-up window opens.
    • You can see a list of all the attributes.
    • You can select all the attributes if required.
    • You can drag any attribute.
    • You can see the total count of columns.
    • You can search for a specific attribute using the Search field.
    • Click to toggle between a Card view and a Grid view. By default, the view that is displayed is the Card view.
    • Attributes that cannot be dragged have a Gray color background.
    • When you edit anything on the Attributes tab, the (Manage Attributes) icon gets disabled.
    • Select an attribute to view it on this page. You can also clear the checkbox to ensure that the attribute is not displayed (hide) on this page.
    • To apply the updates, click Apply.
    • To reset all the updates that have been done on the Manage Attributes pop-up window, click Reset.
      Following updates, if done, get through the Manage Attributes pop-up window gets reset.
      • Hide or show attributes
      • Rearrangement of rid columns either through the grid or the Manage Attributes pop-up window
      • Changes to the column width
      • Filter and sort
      • Selection
    State maintenance
    • On navigation to some other page, the last state of the screen (including grid state) is retained.
    • If you make any update in the Attribute collection (like add new attribute, delete attribute, or hide any attribute) and then navigate to the Free Text Search page, the grid state gets reset.
    • If you change the view, the grid state gets reset to its original default settings.
    Important: You cannot view Entry reference type of attributes in the Free Text Search results.
    Important: If you take a backup of a company, then delete it, and create a new company with the same name, you must restart the Persona-based UI services before you import the data into the new company. OpenSearch picks up the new set of data after full indexing. If you do not restart the services, OpenSearch picks up the container IDs from the cache, and hence the item data does not open on the single-edit page.

    Fix Pack 3 NLP Search feature guidelines

    List of the guidelines for using the NLP search feature.

    NLP queries

    • Query must contain the name of the attribute on which results are expected.
    • Ensure that the attributes used are indexed before running NLP queries.
    • NLP Search supports only primary spec attributes as of now.
    • 'is' 'like' 'in' 'between' 'not' 'from' 'where' 'group' 'order' 'limit' 'offset' 'asc' 'desc' - Special characters must not be a part of the attribute name.
    • The more you fine-tune the prompt, the more accurate the results are. For any persona, NLP works accurate the results aronly when they have access to watsonx catalog and hierarchy

    NLP search results

    • Due to OpenSearch's limitation for the multi-occurrence attributes, the NLP search does not yield any results for the multi-occurrence attributes.

What to do next

Click an entry to open the entry details in the single-edit page. For more information on the single-edit page tasks and tabs, see