Searching Text Fields

ASN Search provides two ways to perform free text searches:

• You can use the q parameter to search the default search field for one or more terms. By default, this searches all text fields.
• You can use the bq parameter to search one or more text fields.

When you search text fields, ASN Search finds all items that contain the search terms anywhere within the specified field, in any order. For example, in the ASN dataset, the description field is configured as a text field. If you search the description field for "read", you will find all of the items that contain read anywhere in the description field, such as read, read books, and a student will learn how to read. This differs from searching a literal field, where the field value must be identical to the search string to be considered a match.

When searching text fields, you can:

• Use Boolean operators when specifying the terms you are searching for. ASN Search supports three operators in text searches: - (NOT), | (OR), and + (AND).
• Use the wildcard operator to perform prefix searches. ASN Search only supports the wildcard operator *, which matches zero or more characters at the end of the specified term.
• Use quotes to search for phrases.