Refining Your Search Results

You can refine your search results using 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 object name, the description, the author name, or keywords 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 on what has been selected in the other two panels.

The following panels are available:

The Type panel shows the available object types. In SAS Visual Analytics, you can search for SAS report (2G), Table, Stored process, Visual data query, or Visual exploration. Depending on the SAS products that you have licensed at your site, other SAS object types might appear in the Type panel. The default is All object types.

The available types are determined by the capabilities that your system administrator has assigned. For example, you might see only the All, SAS report (2G), Table, and Stored process check boxes in the Type panel.

If you select all of the check boxes for the individual types, then the check boxes clear, and the All check box is selected automatically. If you clear the check boxes for all of the 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 to search for a specific author, or to select one or more authors by name.

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

If you select all of the check boxes for the authors in the list, then the check boxes clear, and the All check box is selected automatically. If you clear the check boxes for all of the authors, then the All check box is selected automatically.
The Date Modified panel lists the dates that the objects were last modified. You can refine the search to a specific date range by specifying a From date, a To date, or both. If the initial results set represents only a single day, then the From and To fields are hidden to conserve visual space.

The dates are time zone dependent. If your company has offices in multiple time zones, then the date modified time stamp on the object reflects the time at which 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, another user in California sees that it was modified 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. Breadcrumbs change as you modify the selections in the Type, Author, and Date Modified panels. The breadcrumbs also show any search strings that you entered in the Search within results field.

The appearance of the left panel is 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, when you log off and log back on, the Type panel remains collapsed, and the Refine Results section has 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 for the word sample. Then, you refine the search results by selecting Stored process for Type. All stored processes that contain the word sample are displayed in the workspace. Here is an example of the refined search results:

Refined Search Results on the Home Page