PPO provides its users with advanced search functionality. A Search icon is visible on the Main Menu on the top right hand corner of each page in PPO.
The search box is only visible when you click on the Search icon. Below is what it looks like when you’ve clicked on the Search icon.
Once you have typed in the search box and hit the “Enter” key on the keyboard, the user will be taken to the Search page as seen below.
The search functionality in PPO also does a search on Conversations. Below is an example of a search done while on the Project List Page. You will notice that the term "Conversation" is below the entity item name. Drilling into the project will take you to the project and not to the specific conversation on the project.
Take note of the following features:
1. The Search page will display the first 50 results ranked based on an internal search score. If there are more than 50 results a “More results” option will be shown at the bottom of the page. Once the user has clicked on the “More results” the next 50 results will load.
The page will not be reloaded, but instead, the results will be added to the search page, below the results already displayed.
2. If no more search results are available, the words “No more results” will be displayed at the bottom of the page.
3. If there are no results for the specific terms, then the words “No results were found” will be displayed below the search box.
4. When searching from an entity list / view or edit page, like the project list page for example, the search will automatically be filtered for that entity. The specific entity will be highlighted on the left of the search page where all the entities are listed. On other pages, for example the Home Page, all entities will be included in the results.
5. Each search result shows the title of the record, entity and highlights the term / phrase in the context where it was found (the term/s searched for will be shown in bold letters).
6. To open the search record, simply click on the link and the view page for the record will be displayed.
7. The search can be narrowed by selecting a specific entity or expanded to all entities by clicking on All Entities on the left of the search results.
8. The search can be narrowed further by selecting an applicable time period for when a record was last updated. The options are to include only records updated in the last day, week, month, year, two years or any record regardless of when it was last updated. The default result is items for Last year.
9. Below the time period filter option there is a resource relevancy filter option. The available selections are “Everyone”, “Related to me” or “Updated by me”. The “Everyone” filter option includes all records in PPO. The “Related to me” option includes only records which are related to the user who is doing the search. This means that only records that were associated with the user at some point will be included in the search results. For example issues that were assigned to the user in the past or present. The “Updated by me” option will only include records in the search that were updated by the user at some point.
Additional considerations:
- Words with two characters or less are not taken into consideration when searching. Generic stop words like “and”, “the”,“also” etc, are also not taken into consideration.
- When searching, try not to include generic terms which will result in a large number of matches, e.g. "project", "plan", "people", etc.
- If you include multiple terms in your search, items matching any of the terms will be included in the search although items that contain both words will score higher.
- Items where the search terms appear in the title of the item will score higher than items where the search terms appear elsewhere.
- The Approvals and Time Entries entities are excluded from all searches.