hidden search functions

[evenhuis]

Hi all,

I've been playing around with the search function, especially the key-value searching:
http://help.openmicroscopy.org/search.html

It seems that there is also a NOT function that removes matches the search. From my playing around:

• The precedence is AND > OR > NOT
• The NOTs need to come last in the query
• brackets don't have an effect

Is there some detailed documentation about search facility? I think that complex searches over detailed key-value pair metadata could be a very useful tool for us.

Thanks,

Chris

[Dominik]

Hi Chris,

the search function provides an easy way to perform general, basic searches, it's not very suitable for complex searches yet. It basically takes the query string and the various options/tick boxes the user specifies and assembles a query which is handled by the Lucene backend.
Lucene itself would be capable of handling very complex queries. Unfortuntaly it's not yet directly accessible by the clients. But we're investigating the possibility to implement that in form of an "Advanced" search field in the OMERO.web client.

But coming back to your question: There's no other documentation about the search function than http://help.openmicroscopy.org/search.html . You might find the documentation about the Lucene query syntax useful, too. But keep in mind that the query string in the OMERO clients is not a Lucene query, it gets processed and assembled into a Lucene query (although with the keywords like AND, OR, NOT passed through).

Kind Regards,
Dominik