Top Producer^® 8i CRM: Advanced Search

Most of the time, you will be able to locate the contacts you need by using the Quick Search feature or the Contacts list available on the right of many pages. Should you need to use a more complex search, the Advanced Search feature provides the ability to search by custom defined combinations of criteria, chosen from all searchable fields.

To access Advanced Search, select Search for Contacts from the Contacts menu, and click the Advanced Search tab at the top of the search page. On the Advanced Search form, you can define multiple search conditions – each with different criteria.

For each condition, you must specify the following:

• A record type, such as a contact.
• A field to search on, such as a last name.
• The value of the field, such as “Johnson”.
• An operator to determine how to search on the field and value, such as “contain any of” or “start with”.

Creating a Search Condition

1. Begin by selecting which type of record you’d like to search in the Search For field: Contacts, Property Statistics, Listings, Closings, Notes, or Activities. Note that the choice made here will affect what choices become available in the subsequent options.

   

2. In the with drop-down list, choose the field you would like to search, such as Contact Type or City. Again, the option you choose here will affect what is available in the remainding option.

3. In the that drop-down list, select how you would like to search for that criteria.

   Click here for a description of the various options that can appear in this list:

   • Contain any of: The selected search criteria will be associated with the Boolean operator OR. This means that a record that contains any of the criteria will be considered a valid match for this search condition.
   • Contain all of: The selected search criteria will be associated with the Boolean operator AND. This means that a record must contain all of the criteria to be considered a valid match for this search condition.
   • Don’t contain any of: A record must not contain any of the criteria to be considered a valid match for this search condition.
   • Don’t contain all of: A record must not contain all of the selected criteria to be considered a valid match for this search condition. A record containing part of the selected criteria will not be considered a match.
   • Match any of: A record must contain an exact match of any of the search criteria to be considered a valid match for this condition. This option is useful when searching for exact text that you have manually provided in a search field. It is not usually necessary when searching by criteria selectable from a list, such as Contact Type, as they are already exact matches.
   • Match all of: A record must contain an exact match of all of the search criteria to be considered a valid match for this condition. This option is useful when searching for exact text that you have manually provided in a search field. It is not usually necessary when searching by criteria selectable from a list, such as Contact Type, as they are already exact matches.
   • Start with: The field you are searching in a record must start with the text entered. For instance, searching for a Contact’s first name that starts with “Jo” will return contacts with the first name of “John”, “Joe”, “Joseph”, “Jolene”, etc.
   • When searching Date Fields, there are varous options for specifying date ranges such as before, after, between, within a year of, etc. Each option presents one or two date fields where the dates can be specified.
   • When searching numerical fields, such as the year a property was built, various options are available such as equal, less than, greater than, not equal to, etc.

    

   

4. Provide the specific search criteria. Depending on the options chosen above, this will be done either will a multi-selection box, pull-down list, text field, or date field.

   

If this is the only required search condition, click the Search button to perform the search and generate the list of results. To create more refined searches, it is possible to create additional search conditions.

Creating Additional Conditions

To add another search condition, click the Add Condition link at the bottom of the form. This creates another condition box in which you can add search criteria exactly as before.

On the left of the new condition is a pull-down list where you must choose how the search will associate the two conditions:

• AND: Any record that is a valid match for the first condition must also be a valid match for the second condition in order to be considered a match for the search and be returned in the search results.
• OR: Any record that is a valid match for either of the search conditions will be considered a match for the search and will be returned in the search results.

Using Multiple Conditions

When adding multiple search conditions, it is important to note how your selections of AND and OR will be grouped together when the search is performed. The Advanced Search follows the Boolean “order-of-operations“, which always gives AND priority. This means that conditions joined by an AND will be grouped together, with any surrounding OR‘s treated as a separate condition.

Below are a couple of examples of how this works:

Example 1:

Example 2:

With the advanced search feature you can build very specific and refined searches to find the exact combination of contacts that you are looking for.

Log in to access Advanced Search.