Search

  • For details about the indexing methods used to search records see Indexing in Vitalware.
  • As many institutions that use Vitalware have extremely large databases, it may be necessary to limit a search to complete within a specified amount of time or to return no more than a specified number of records. To set the maximum search time and / or records retrieved see Searching options.
  • A detailed examination of Vitalware's support for Unicode, and how it impacts searching, is available in Support for Unicode.

There are many modules in Vitalware and each module has multiple pages and each page can have numerous fields. Fields can record text as well as multimedia (images, video, audio). Vitalware has a powerful search engine that can search across multiple fields and modules within one operation. Taking advantage of Boolean operators (AND, NOT, OR), wildcards (^, $, *,?), and a range of other special characters (@ for phonetic search; ~ for stemming, etc.) can greatly fine-tune your search.

Vitalware introduced full Unicode support with version 3.0. Unicode support greatly enhances searching in Vitalware, making it possible, for instance, to search for punctuation either as individual characters (?) or as part of a more complex string (fred@global.com).

If you are already familiar with searching in Vitalware, you will know that certain punctuation characters have a special meaning when used in a search. For example, searching for fre* in Vitalware 2.5 will find all words beginning with the letters fre. In Vitalware 3.0 onwards it is necessary to escape these special characters in order to have their special meaning applied. If the character is not escaped, the search will look for that character rather than applying its special meaning. A search for fre* in Vitalware 3.0 onwards will locate the four characters fre*.

Escaping a character involves preceding it with a backslash (\). Thus, to locate all words beginning with the letters fre in Vitalware 2.5, we'd search for fre*. To perform the same search in Vitalware 3.0, we'd search for fre\*.

Where support for Unicode alters the way a specific type of search is configured, details are provided in this documentation. For a comprehensive look at Vitalware's support for Unicode and the implications for searching, you may be interested in reading Support for Unicode.

By default, when a module is first opened it is in Search mode. Unless you are adding a new record, the first thing you'll probably want to do is search your existing records. With Vitalware it is possible to:

  • Run a search over multiple fields in a single operation.
  • Modify a previous search by adding or deleting search terms.
  • Perform an additional search and combine the results of this second (or third or nth) search with those of the previous search using one of the following relationships:

    Merge (OR)

    Intersect (AND)

    Subtract (NOT)

  • Nominate a Sort to be run automatically following a search.

The most frequently used search commands are:

Menu bar

Tool bar

Keyboard shortcut

Description

File>Search

Search

CTRL+F

Run a search.

The Screen Mode automatically changes to Display mode.

File>New Search

New Search

ALT+F+E

Return to Search mode, clearing all values from fields except for any default search values.

File>Previous Search

Previous Search

ALT+F+R

Return to Search mode keeping any values that were entered in the last search.

Edit>Clear All

 

SHIFT+DEL

Clear values from all fields, including any default values (though not from read-only fields).