Refining Your Search Results

You can refine your search results following your original search on the metadata server. After you enter your original search using the menu bar on the home page, the search results are displayed in the workspace. Note that when you refine your search results, the initial 5000 item subset is not affected.

The refine search feature is dependent on your locale. The search is not case sensitive. No special characters are recognized, except spaces and quotation marks (").

You can refine the search results displayed in the workspace using the Search within results field in the left pane. When you enter a term or terms, you can use quotation marks (") and spaces when you are searching within your results. Only the items that match your refined search appear in your workspace. Each search term that you enter must appear at least once in the report name, the description, or the author name in the metadata.

You can also refine your search results by selecting (or clearing) check boxes in the left pane. Note that the totals in the parentheses in any panel are dependent upon what has been selected in the other two panels.

The following panels are available:

The Type panel enables you to specify if you want to search for Reports, Explorations, or Stored Processes. The default is all object types.

The available types are determined by the capabilities that your administrator has assigned. For example, you might see only reports in the list.

If you select the check boxes for all three types, then the check boxes clear and the All check box is selected automatically for all available types. Also, if you clear the check boxes for all three types, then the All check box is selected automatically.

Note: If your role permits you to see only one type, then you will not see the Type panel.
The Author panel enables you search for a specific author, or select one or more authors by name.

The number in parentheses beside the author’s name identifies the number of objects that they have created using the filters that have been activated in the other panels.

If you select the check boxes for all of the authors in the list, then the check boxes clear and the All check box is selected automatically. Also, if you clear the check boxes for all of the authors, then the All check box is selected automatically.
The Modified panel lists the modified dates of the objects that were found on the server. You refine the search to a specific date range by specifying a From date, a To date, or both.

The dates are time zone dependent. If your company has offices in multiple time zones, then the time stamp on the report, exploration, or stored process reflects the time it was saved using the current user's time zone. For example, if a report was modified by a user on January 3 at 2:00 a.m. in New York, then another user in California can see that it was saved on January 2 at 11:00 p.m.

At the top of the workspace, you can see the breadcrumbs for the selections that you have made to refine your search. These selections change as you modify the items that you have selected in the Type, Author, and Modified panels. The breadcrumb also shows any search string that you entered in the Search within results field.

Your selections in the left panel are saved across sessions of SAS Visual Analytics. For example, if you collapse the Type panel and then change the width of the Refine Results section, then when you log off and back on, the Type panel remains collapsed and the Refine Results section remains at the new width. This is important to remember if you close the Refine Results section. Your Refine Results selections are not retained across sessions or primary searches in SAS Visual Analytics.

Suppose that you search on the word sample. Then, you refine the search results by selecting Reports for the Type. All reports that contain the word sample are displayed in the workspace. Here is an example of the search results:

Search Results on the Home Page