I’ve run into a problem with my app when I search terms.
My label column is “item name” which is a descriptive name of inventory items. Users need to be able to search various terms to find inventory items as they have several adjectives associated with each item but searches are not coming up as expected.
For example, one item is called “top cover panel” and if you search any of those words individually then the item comes up. If you search “top cover” or “cover panel” then the item comes up.
But if you search “top panel” the item does not come up.
I have checked that my column is searchable and is set to the text data type. Is this a fixable error?
Unfortunately, the Search capability is limited to single phrase searches. AppSheet will match the phrase in the search bar as typed WITHOUT case sensativity.
However, there is the filtering option which allows users to filter the data based on exact data values present. This should allow more precise searching. See images below!
Why doesn’t it appear? Because the name on your label is top cover panel, so if you search for top panel, it obviously won’t appear, unless the item name top panel is on the label, it will definitely appear. Only the top, top cover or cover, cover panel, panel parts appear, it can’t be top panel because they are different words.
this is just an example : Indofood Sukses makmur. Search Indofood Makmur will not appear
As other community colleagues have confirmed, AppSheet search will not work on combination of words if those are not in a continuous string.
Will something like below do? This is a workaround that uses some additional configuration around views and slices.
Please refer the GIF below.There are three records with item name containing panel , namely “Top cover panel”, “Side cover panel” and “bottom cover panel” . Have purposely applied format rules of red color to these three records to easily locate.
When searched with the first and third word “bottom panel” and “Side panel” , the respective single records get selected.
In the following example, there are three records , namely “Green traffic light”, “Amber traffic light” and “Red traffic light”. When searched with the first and third words “Green light” and “Red light” the respective records get selected.
The search also returns for single and dual words such as only “top” or “top cover” or “cover panel”
If you think this is something useful, I can share further implementation details. For configuration sharing that matches your app configuration, also please let me know if yours is a single user or multi user app.
Hello @mm1025 and everyone,
Thank you so much for sharing all of this valuable information!
If the provided solution worked for you, @mm1025 please consider marking it as the accepted answer. This can help other community members discover the right solution when experiencing the same issue in the future.
I marked one answer as a solution as it acknowledged the answer to my question, that the search function native to AppSheet is restricted to matching exact strings.
Thank you for the links to resources, at this time I will not be implementing a workaround but I appreciate the information in case I want to go down that road in the future.
