If you’ve added metadata fields to your documents, rejoice: now you can search them!
I’ll set metadata on two documents for a quick demonstration:
Now, I can search these new fields by prepending [Field Name]: to the search:
Here are the subtle rules. Consider them an addendum to our previous search syntax blog post:
- Date:2015-11-08 will match all documents containing the phrase “
2015-11-08” in the “Date” field (assuming you created a “Date” field). - date:2015-11-08 will not match any documents in this example. (Field names are case-sensitive.)
- "Full Name":John Smith lets you specify a field name with spaces. (Field names with spaces or parentheses must be quoted.)
- Author:Adam H* will search for any phrase starting with “
Adam H” in the “Author” field. (All usual search syntax works on metadata fields.) - Be wary when your field names clash with Overview’s built-in names. text:Overview and title:Overview continue to search the actual documents’ texts and titles, not any “
text” or “title” metadata fields you may have added. If you have a metadata field named “text“, you can force a metadata search by quoting the field name: for instance, "text":Overview. - We search all metadata the same way we search document text: we ignore punctuation and we don’t allow comparisons such as, “search for all documents with a Date within the past year”.