InformationLeader facilitates the ability to search Form Instances that meet certain criteria by building a Form Search. This function is really powerful since it allows searching Forms based on values saved within the Form Instances. This article will show a step-by-step guide to build a custom Search.
In this example, we will search the Employees Forms to get a list of all the male employees. The Form Template has a drop-down option in the Form Header section to select whether an employee is Male or Female.
The steps to build the search are as follows:
- Hover over Forms menu item and click ‘Search Forms’.
- Click the New button from the Action buttons.
- Enter the details as below (Mandatory fields are marked with *):
- Name* : Enter a descriptive name for the search. In this example, we will enter “Employees by Gender”.
- Assignment* : Setting this to Multiple Users will make this search available to other users in the system as well while Single User will only let the person setting up the search to access this search. In this example, we will use ‘Single User’.
- Type* : Record Level search is used when you want to return a form where all of the search criteria has to apply to a single record. In this example, we will use ‘Form Level’.
- Assigned Form Templates* : Allows you to select the templates that you wish to build the search against. Searches can be built against single or multiple Form Templates. In this example, we will select the ‘EMP – Employee Details’ form template.
- Description : Enter a description to explain the purpose/functionality of this search. This field is non-mandatory.
- Under the details tab, click on the ‘Item’ field and select ‘Sex’ under ‘Employee Details’ block, change ‘Comparison’ to ‘Equals’, set ‘Value’ to ‘Male’ and click ‘Add’ button.
- Click Save
The Search Filter is now setup. You can run this search by simply clicking the Search button next to the Save button. This will bring up a pop-up, where you can change the gender option to search for Female or Male and click Run.
In order to use this search again, simply navigate to the Employee form summary page and select ‘Employee by Gender’ in the Search Filter options.
The same technique can be used to build complex searches using ‘AND’ and ‘OR’ operators to apply multiple search criteria.