Search purchases with partial words

[rubaba]

Hi All,

I have been trying to search in purchases for invoices via the description option, however, the search option was not giving me results. I then made a test purchase below with 4 lines, the last description being xyz. I then ran a search for xyz, but it not return any results. Has anyone noticed this? I would have thought the search feature would search the full purchase for similar letters as input in the search field.

[QFSian]

Hi @rubaba

Thanks for bringing this to our attention. I’ve now raised this with the Development Team.

[sramdeen]

I also find the search problematic and can rarely find what I’m looking for. I described it in a post here Search failures It sounds like we are seeing the same thing, whereby searching for something that you know is in the description for a line item is not yielding the expected results.

[sramdeen]

Having just checked, it seems like it’s more broken than usual. I click on sales -> show all sales and enter ‘cheese’ into the description and click on search. It brings back all of our sales invoices (1112 items found). And no, none of them contains the word cheese!

[QFSian]

Hi @sramdeen

Thank you for highlighting this for us I’ll get the development team to take a look into why this could be happening.

[QFSian]

Hi @sramdeen

There has been a bug identified with this. There will be a fix pushed live tonight. Hopefully this will work for you tomorrow.

[rubaba]

I have noticed another issue. For example if there is a description which contains the word “busy”. Now if i search “bus” it does not produce results with the word “busy” although the three letters BUS are in the word busy. Is there any way to add the feature so that you can search it.

Thanks

[QFSian]

Hi @rubaba

I’m afraid that I’m unable to replicate this. Would it be possible for you to send in screenshots of what you’re seeing?

With screenshots, can you please redact any sensitive information.

[rubaba]

in the first example i have searched the word “airpods”- i get results for the invoices which contain the description “airpods”

in the second example, i have searched “airpod” and i get results for invoices which contain “airpod”

However, what i want is that when i search “airpod” it gives me the results for descriptions which contain the word “airpod” & “airpods” as in the word “airpods” itself the letters for airpod are already there.

Hope that makes sense now lol.

Thanks in advance

[rubaba]

[Paul_Courtier]

Search “Air” what do you get? I’m just thinking that the search criteria would be looking for an exact match first, and since you have both Airpod and Airpods it would only bring back one result.

Try Air and tell me what happens?

Side note, for one of my clients I have to include a payment ref in the description, they all start with 2005xxxx. Me personally, would not want every single invoice to be a result because it would make the search feature useless.

[QFSian]

Hi @rubaba

Thank you for these. I’ve asked a member of the development team to take a look into this for you.

[rubaba]

When searching Air as you suggested, no results come back with airpod or airpods in the description.

[Paul_Courtier]

I think the best option would be to include an option in the search criteria for exact match or similar match. That way it would benefit the op and at the same time not make the search feature redundant for others like the example I gave.

[rubaba]

I was thinking along the same lines as you have suggested. I have this feature in the software I have had made for my stock control so it should not be too hard for the developers to implement this.

[rubaba]

Any update on this please. Thanks

[Glenn]

@rubaba

When searching Air as you suggested, no results come back with airpod or airpods in the description.

Firstly I apologise for the delayed response here.

In late 2019 we switched to a different search algorithm for invoices, the original method was not scalable and was causing exessive load on our database. We’ve now switched to a “full text search engine”, it is significantly quicker and allows deep searching of invoice lines from the quick search box in the left hand menu.

One of the trade offs here is that it won’t return partial word matches, so you’d need to enter the whole word. We are looking to introduce support for wildcards (e.g air*) in the future but we don’t have a fixed timescale for this just yet.