About Searching from the Classic Home Page

You can search all reports, explorations, stored processes, stored process reports, tables, and queries that are on the metadata server from the menu bar on the classic home page. The list of items that you can search for depends on the SAS products that your site has licensed.

Note: There can be a delay between the time that an object (for example, a report or an exploration) is created or changed and when the search is updated.

The following fields in metadata are searched:

Comment Title
Comment Description
Created
Description
Keywords
Last Modified
Title

The search field on the menu bar supports the following types of searches:

single word
multiple word
in-word wildcards

Note: A wildcard search has a limit of 200 words.

Use the asterisk (*) to represent possible characters in a particular position in a word to generalize the word or to make it easier to find in a search. For example, if you specify “cat*”, then the search matches any word with the prefix cat, such as cats, category, catfish, and so on.
spaces in strings that use quotation marks indicate that the words are considered together as a phrase for the search. For example, suppose that you search for "Sample Report”. The search matches Sample Report 1 and A Sample Report, but not Sample Values Report or Sample-Report.
the AND operator

For example, if you specify “A AND B”, then only documents that contain both A and B are returned.
plus (+) and minus (-) syntax

The plus (+) sign and minus (-) sign are prefix operators. This means that the operator precedes the search term that is required or excluded, rather than following it. For example:
- Specifying 2012 2013 2014 matches documents that contain any of the three terms.
- Specifying +2012 +2013 +2014 matches only documents that contain all three terms.
- Specifying 2012 2013 -2014 matches documents that contain 2012 or 2013, but only if they do not contain 2014.

Here are some considerations for searching from the classic home page:

Single- and multiple-word searches that are plain text have a wildcard appended to them. For example, if you search for the word sample, then it is converted to sample*. This means that you get different results than if you entered “sample”, +sample, or *sample*.
The search is not case sensitive.
Up to 5000 items can be returned in a single search. If your search results exceed 5000 items, then the first 5000 items appear, and a message is displayed at the top of the Search Results window. The message tells you how many results matched your search and how many have been displayed. Narrowing your search using the search field enables the relevant search results to be displayed. When you submit a new search that returns fewer than 5000 items, you can see all the search results.
Search results on the classic home page are not ranked. In the workspace, you can use the Sort by drop-down list to specify that you want the list of items to sort by Alphabetical ascending, Alphabetical descending, Date ascending, or Date descending. The default is Alphabetical ascending.
A search string must be shorter than 4,000 characters.

Suppose that you search for the word sample. All words that contain sample at the beginning are displayed in the workspace. (For example, a word that starts with samples is displayed.) Here is an example of the search results:

Search Results on the Classic Home Page

Last updated: January 8, 2019