Universal Search

Question

Client: Champion Forest Baptist Church

Asana Task: https://app.asana.com/0/1203194444641509/1204129509354962/f

They'd like to be able to use this feature more, but are having issues with the birthdate and phone number searches, specifically regarding the use (or not) of special characters in the field formatting...

Birthdate: They receive errors when the birthdate is entered with special characters (i.e. / or -) - no results or an 'We Can't Find that Page' error message.

Phone Number: They receive no results when they use any kind of special character (i.e. () or -).

• Is this a known issue? I couldn't find anything recent in GitHub.

• Are there some settings/configuration that can be added to recognize the different ways these search criteria are entered - i.e. including OR excluding special characters?

Answer 1

If you go to General Settings > Search Services and edit the Universal Search service and change the Result URL value from: universalsearch/{0}?SmartSearch=true to: universalsearch?SmartSearch=true&Q={0} That will fix the 404 error when entering a "/" in the search field.

That said, universal search does not index any boolean, date, or number fields on a model, so you can't use it to search for birthdate.

To search for phone numbers, it requires you to NOT enter any special characters. So you would need to just enter the digits.

It is possible to add new search types to the dropdown though with code. So if they had to have a birthdate search, it could be done, although depending on their use-case might be better just to create a filterable report for that.