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SkyVault Enterprise 4.1.10 ยป Reference

Search syntax

The following sections describe the SkyVault search syntax.

The SkyVault Full Text Search (FTS) query text can be used standalone or it can be embedded in CMIS-SQL using the contains() predicate function. The CMIS specification supports a subset of SkyVault FTS. The full power of SkyVault FTS can not be used and, at the same time, maintain portability between CMIS repositories.

SkyVault FTS is exposed directly by the interface, which adds its own template, and is also used as its default field. The default template is: 
%(cm:name cm:title cm:description ia:whatEvent ia:descriptionEvent lnk:title lnk:description TEXT)

When SkyVault FTS is embedded in CMIS-SQL, only the CMIS-SQL-style property identifiers (cmis:name) and aliases, CMIS-SQL column aliases, and the special fields listed can be used to identify fields. The SQL query defines tables and table aliases after from and join clauses. If the SQL query references more than one table, the contains() function must specify a single table to use by its alias. All properties in the embedded FTS query are added to this table and all column aliases used in the FTS query must refer to the same table. For a single table, the table alias is not required as part of the contains() function.

When SkyVault FTS is used standalone, fields can also be identified using prefix:local-name and {uri}local-name styles.

  • Search for a single term Single terms are tokenized before the search according to the appropriate data dictionary definition(s).
  • Search for a phrase Phrases are enclosed in double quotes. Any embedded quotes may be escaped using "\". If no field is specified then the default TEXT field will be used, as with searches for a single term.
  • Search for an exact term To search for an exact term, prefix the term with "=". This ensures that the term will not be tokenized, therefore you can search for stop words.
  • Search for term expansion To force tokenization and term expansion, prefix the term with "~".
  • Search for conjunctions Single terms, phrases, and so on can be combined using "AND" in upper, lower, or mixed case.
  • Search for disjunctions Single terms, phrases, and so on can be combined using "OR" in upper, lower, or mixed case.
  • Search for negation Single terms, phrases, and so on can be combined using "NOT" in upper, lower, or mixed case, or prefixed with "!" or "-".
  • Search for optional, mandatory, and excluded elements of a query Sometimes AND and OR are not enough. If you want to find documents that must contain the term "car", score those with the term "red" higher, but do not match those just containing "red".
  • Search for fields Search specific fields rather than the default. Terms, phrases, etc. can all be preceded by a field. If not the default field TEXT is used.
  • Search for wildcards Wildcards are supported in terms, phrases, and exact phrases using "*" to match zero, one, or more characters and "?" to match a single character. The "*" wildcard character may appear on its own and implies Google-style. The "anywhere after" wildcard pattern can be combined with the "=" prefix for identifier based pattern matching.
  • Search for ranges Inclusive ranges can be specified in Google-style. There is an extended syntax for more complex ranges. Unbounded ranges can be defined using MIN and MAX for numeric and date types and "\u0000" and "\FFFF" for text (anything that is invalid).
  • Search for fuzzy matching Fuzzy matching is not currently implemented. The default Lucene implementation is Levenshtein Distance, which is expensive to evaluate.
  • Search for proximity Google-style proximity is supported.
  • Search for boosts Query time boosts allow matches on certain parts of the query to influence the score more than others.
  • Search for grouping Groupings of terms are made using "(" and ")". Groupings of all query elements are supported in general. Groupings are also supported after a field - field group.
  • Search for spans and positions Spans and positions are not currently implemented. Positions will depend on tokenization.
  • Escaping characters Any character may be escaped using the backslash "\" in terms, IDs (field identifiers), and phrases. Java unicode escape sequences are supported. Whitespace can be escaped in terms and IDs.
  • Mixed FTS ID behavior This relates to the priority defined on properties in the data dictionary, which can be both tokenized or untokenized.
  • Search for order precedence Operator precedence is SQL-like (not Java-like). When there is more than one logical operator in a statement, and they are not explicitly grouped using parentheses, NOT is evaluated first, then AND, and finally OR.
  • Search query syntax APIs The following show how to embed queries in CMIS.
  • Search query templates The FTS query language supports query templates. These are intended to help when building application specific searches.
  • Search query literals Everything is really a term or a phrase. The string representation you type in will be transformed to the appropriate type for each property when executing the query. For convenience, there are numeric literals but string literals may also be used.
Parent topic: Reference

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