Creating Search Expressions

In order to find exactly what you are looking for, you must create the appropriate search expressions. The following sections provide tips on building search expressions.

General Searching Tips

When building search expressions, do not be more specific than you need to be. In searches that use multiple conditions, every field with information in it is used in the search. Therefore, do not guess at what the value might be within a field. Including an incorrect value will cause a contact not to be found. If you are unable to find a contact that you are sure is in the system, expand the folders used in the search and consider using less specific search criteria (fewer fields).

Searching for Phone Numbers

If phone numbers are entered in InterAction with seven or ten digits, InterAction automatically formats the phone numbers with a dash or a dash and parentheses, respectively. So, if you are performing a search for a particular area code, in your search, you need to include parentheses before the area code. For example, to search for all numbers with a 312 area code, you should search for (312 instead of 312.

Searching for Countries

When including countries in a search expression, you have the option to type a country name or select a country from the drop-down list. Typing a country name searches for an exact match. For example, you cannot type the first few letters of the country name to run a “begins with” search. However, you can use wild cards. See Wild Cards.

When including a country name in a search expression, all country names that are set up in InterAction as alternate names for that country are included. For example, your administrator set up the country UK with the alternate name Scotland. If you choose to include UK in the search expression, contacts with addresses in Scotland are also included.

For information on setting up countries and alternate country names, see the Administering InterAction guide.

Search Performance Tips

To improve the performance of complex searches against large sets of data, build the conditions in the following order:

  1. Basic criteria tied to the contact for which you are searching
  2. Any relationship criteria
  3. Associated company criteria

For example, the search “Person vs. Company is Person AND Associated Company’s State is NJ” will run faster than the search “Associated Company’s State is NJ AND Person vs. Company is Person.”

Order of Operations

When combining search conditions, be aware of the following:

  • The AND connector takes precedence over the OR connector.
  • Parentheses takes precedence over any connectors.
  • When “nesting” parentheses, the inner set takes precedence over the outer set.

Wild Cards

Wild cards are special characters used when searching to represent unknown characters. The “any string” wild cards are * (asterisk) and % (percent symbol). They are used to represent an unknown part of a word (any number of characters). The “any character” wild cards are ? (question mark) and _ (underlined space character). They are used to represent a single unknown character.

The following examples demonstrate the use of wild cards:

  • Last Name includes ‘Sm*th’ will find “Smith” and “Smythe”
  • Last Name is ‘Jo*s?n’ will find “Johnson,” “Jonson,” and “Johnsen”