About search
Overview
Note: The search functionality is currently limited to audit properties and custom properties. Other properties, such as the artifact description and status, are not included in the search.
Blueprint provides you with the ability to search for project and audit-related data.
The search icon on the ribbon (Home tab, Artifacts group) allows you to search for any of the following:
- Artifacts and/or folders created by a certain user
- Artifacts and/or folders last edited by a certain user
- Artifacts and/or folders that were last edited before, on or after a specified date
- Artifacts and/or folders that were created before, on or after a specified date
You can also search for data pertaining to any custom property (that is, any project administrator-created property) as long as the custom property type is choice, number or date. Text and usercustom property types currently cannot be included in searches.
Example
Maria is the team lead and project administrator of a requirements project that has multiple contributors. Maria created a multiple-choice custom property (named Cost) to estimate team effort as well as a multiple-choice custom property (named Risk) to estimate the possibility of not completing the work item. Jamal, a team member, wants to find all of the high cost and high risk artifacts in the project so that he can work on them. Jamal uses the search feature to find the artifacts with high cost and high risk values in the shared project, as shown below:
Note: We highly recommend that project administrators use custom properties to organize project and artifact data. In addition to enhancing project and content structure, custom properties can be searched and filtered efficiently.
To refine your search, Blueprint allows you to use operators as well as specify values.
To narrow your search results, you can restrict your search to particular project(s). After you select one or more projects, the properties you can search become available.
Using an operator in your search
To help refine your search, Blueprint provides a number of operators in the drop-down menu. Operators define the relationship between a property and a specified value.
Note: In the example below, the user is searching for items that were completed after a specified date (29/09/2013).
Depending on your search criteria, you may be able to use any of the following operators:
-
Equal
Returns items with the specified value.
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Not Equal
Returns items that do not have the specified value.
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Empty
Returns items that do not have data in the specified property.
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Is Not Empty
Only returns items that have data in the specified property.
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Greater Than
Returns items that have occurred after the specified date or are greater than the specified number.
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Less Than
Returns items that have occurred before the specified date or are less than the specified number.
Search results
After you submit search criteria, search results open in a new tab. You can filter and sort search results like you would sort and filter artifacts in an artifact list.
Each search result shows up on a new line with the following details:
- Project Name
- Project Path
- Name
- ID
- Description
- Artifact Type
- Artifact Path
- Created By
- Created On
- Last Edited By
- Last Edited On
You can edit your search by clicking the query link at the top of the search results.
The maximum number of search results that can appear is 1000, which is a system configurable value.
Tip: You can export your search results to a Microsoft Excel file by clicking the Artifact List View button on the ribbon (Import/Export tab, Export group).
