About 3DSearch Queries

There are several things to know when entering queries in 3DSearch.

This page discusses:

See Also
Performing a Basic Search
Managing Search Results

Search Basics

  • Search is case-insensitive.
  • Search does not support date criteria.
  • To search the content of Collaborative Spaces, you must have the Collaborative Industry Innovator (CSV) role and a set of credentials. For more information, see Changing the Search Settings.
  • To clear the search criteria, click .
Important: Queries must not exceed 5000 characters.

Special Characters

The following table lists the special characters that have an impact on 3DSearch.

Important: Search is primarily for human-readable text. You can search for a string that includes a series of special characters along with non-special characters, for example, @#$!$UID. However, you cannot search for strings containing only special characters, for example, @#$!$.
Special character Description
Wildcard *

Wildcard search is a pattern-matching feature to broaden the search criteria. For example, it allows you to find documents that include test, tests and tessellation when searching on tes*.

You cannot use wildcards with double-byte characters.

Note: Even if the user query does not contain any wildcard character (*), the search mechanism uses "implicit wildcarding" automatically. While 3DSearch queries the indexed content with the strict user input, it also runs this internal wildcarding in parallel to broaden the search criteria for predefined properties, like Title, Name, and a few others.
Important: You cannot append or prepend a single character by a wildcard. For example, you cannot search for a*, *a or *a*, whereas you can search for a. You can search for <String>*,*<String>, or *<String>*, if the string length is higher than 1.
Question mark ? Like the wildcard *, the question mark ? is a pattern-matching feature to broaden the search criteria.

If a question mark is part of the string you are searching, precede it with a backslash \ to take it into account. For example, to search for the string test?, enter test\?.

Double quote " Use double quotes to surround and search for an exact phrase.

If a double quote is part of the string you are searching, precede it with a backslash \ to take it into account. For example, to search for the string test", enter test\".

3DSearch supports exact search with double quotes for 3DSpace data only.

Note: The current search behavior relies on a tokenization (process of splitting up a segment of text into smaller pieces, or tokens) definition, which facilitates partial searches, as they are very useful for full-text search use cases. This tokenization definition also impacts exact search. For example, if we index the string XYZ_Test22, the tokenization is such that we index: xyz, test22, and XYZ_Test22. As we have 3 different tokens, searching for "XYZ_Test22" therefore gives more results than expected.
User Query Language (UQL) reserved characters

The search engine interprets the following characters as User Query Language operators:

  • Parentheses ( or )
  • Square Brackets [ or ]
  • Curly Brackets { or }
  • Equal Sign =
  • Less than or greater than < or >
  • Colon :, reserved for search with predefined queries (for example, prd:searchstring to search for products).
  • Double Quote "
  • Plus sign +, used to search for an exact word. For example, searching for window returns results for both singular and plural forms, whereas searching for +window returns results for the singular form only.
  • Minus sign -, used to search with excluded words (like the NOT operator). For example, searching for 3D -geometry returns results for documents containing 3D but not geometry.
  • Back slash \ (used to escape reserved characters).
  • Line feed \n, carriage return \r, tab \t
  • Comma ,, forward slash / and equal sign = are nonexact match characters that find more matches that you might expected. For example, if you have the terms abc.def and abc$def in the index, a search for abc.def finds both matches. "abc.def" finds the exact match only.

Important:
  • Use backslash \ before these characters to escape their interpretation. For example, for the string abc{def enter abc\{def to disable the interpretation of the curly bracket { and consider it as a punctuation character. 3DSearch therefore removes them from the query as any other punctuation character.
  • You can take reserved characters into account in your queries by enclosing them with double quotes "". For example, to search for:
    • the string (test) enter "(test)"
    • the string TEST [5280 original Node] enter "TEST [5280 original Node]" or "TEST" "[5280 original Node]"
    • the string abc\def enter "abc\def"

For more information about UQL, see Installation and Setup | Information Intelligence | Business Analytics Server | Configuration | Configuring Search Queries | User Query Language (UQL).

For the 3DSwym service and for 3DSpace, 3DSearch does not take punctuation marks and symbols into account, and treats them as separators only. For example:

  • Semicolon ;
  • Dot .
  • Comma ,
  • Forward slash /
  • Backward slash \
  • Pipe |
  • At @
  • Exclamation mark !
  • Percent %
  • Hash #
  • Caret ^
  • Tilde ~
  • Dollar sign $
  • Single quote '
  • Ampersand &
  • Underscore _

For example, 3DSearch interprets Mypart.0123 as Mypart 0123 by default.

UQL operators and operands

If the query syntax is correct, you can use logical expression operators and operands, like OR, AND, NOT, TO etc. For example, use OR to specify a list of similar terms that may occur in the document you are looking for: (NLS setting) OR (language) searches for documents containing either NLS setting or language.

For more information about UQL, see Installation and Setup | Information Intelligence | Business Analytics Server | Configuration | Configuring Search Queries | User Query Language (UQL).

Hyphen -

For the 3DSpace service, 3DSearch interprets the string Mypart-0123 as both Mypart-0123 and Mypart 0123.

For the 3DSwym service, 3DSearch interprets Mypart-0123 as Mypart 0123 by default.

Double-byte and Extended ASCII A sequence of several double-byte characters matches text in that order only. For example, 石英 matches objects containing these consecutive characters but it does not match 英石.