Oracle UCM: Searching content using logical operators

This post is about methods for content retrieval in Oracle WebCenter Content (formerly known as UCM) using common logical operators.
Searches among contents, as all of you know, can be performed using two search forms: Quick Search and Full Search. The thing that maybe not everyone knows is that both of them support the use of logical operators for content searches.

Quick search, as name suggests, is the quickest way for content search.

Full Search is the search form displayed, by default, in the upper menu and it is the most complete solution for content retrieval infact it allows users to search against every metadata defined by the system administrator.
It can also be easily customized by using check-in profiles restricting users to search only against metadata that are significant for a particular document type.

Methods for content retrieval can be applied to both Quick and Full Search and allow to increase the flexibility of your searches.

Here they are:


AND Operator:

Use: search_term_1 AND search_term_2

Equivalent to using SPACE between search terms:  search_term_1 search_term_2

Example: billing AND expenses

This returns all documents that contains billing AND expenses words.


OR Operator:

Use: search_term_1 OR search_term_2
Equivalent to using COMMA between search terms:  search_term_1, search_term_2

Example: billing OR expenses

This returns all documents that contains billing OR expenses words.


NOT Operator:

Use: search_term_1 NOT search_term_2
Equivalent to using MINUS between search terms:  search_term_1 -search_term_2

Example: billing NOT expenses

This returns only documents that contains billing word NOT documents containing expenses word.


MATCHES Operator:

Use: "search_term_1"

Example: "billing expenses"

This returns all documents that contains the exact billing expenses word.


Nested Operators:

Use: (search_term_1 [OPERATION] search_term_2) [OPERATION] search_term_x

Performs searches in the order specified by the parenthesis.

Example: (billing AND expenses AND june) NOT 2008

This searches first all documents that contains billing AND expenses AND june words then from all these documents it returns only the ones that does NOT contain the word 2008.

Note: By default Quick Search performs content retrieval against title, content ID, and full text. This behaviour, as Kyle suggests in his article, can be modified editing UCM configuration parameters (Administration -> Admin Server -> Server Configuration) by adding following line:

QuickSearchFields=dDocName|dDocTitle|dDocFullText|dDocAuthor|xYourCustomMetadata

Where xYourCustomMetadata is the name of your custom metadata you need to perform searches against. Obviously this line can be tuned according to your preferences if you for example want not to search among fulltext just remove it from configuration parameter.

QuickSearch search patterns can also be modified. Editing the same configuration as explained above you can customize them:

QuickSearchOperators=hasAsSubstring,hasAsSubstring,fullText,hasAsSubstring,hasAsSubstring,equals

That's all!!