LinkedIn
Twitter
Hi everyone 
I have a simple home inventory app, with tables for items, categories and locations.
But when I’m on a “view” in the app that shows categories, clicking the search icon at the top just searches categories. I’d like to make it instead search items. Is that possible?
If not, can I hide that top search icon?
The other issue I’m having is that “search” is so literal. Searching “Usb cable” finds an item called ‘usb cable’ but not ‘usb black cable’. Is there a simple way to fix that?
Thanks in advance for any help :)))
Toby
Solved
1 ACCEPTED SOLUTION
You’re missing some important operators:
No, it only searches the displayed table or slice.
Unfortunately, there’s no way to hide just the search bar but keep the main menu.
Depends on your definition of “simple”. The built-n search feature is a simple exact-text search, as you’ve noticed. You could implement your own search feature (but it wouldn’t use the search bar), but it’s not trivial, but it also wouldn’t be horrifically difficult, either. You could also “easily” expand the scope of search while you were at it.
Thanks guys! Assistant is so much better than search, you’re right. It’s quite counter intuitive though - I wish I could make the “search” button return proper search results like the Assistant does (ie. Not only find perfect phrase matches but rather look for any combo of the search terms in its results).
But yes, looks like I’m stuck with hiding the search button (and also the menu!). 😕 thanks though for your help!!
Now to work out how to craft an expression for my own search :))
I guess, in plain English, it needs to “**
take search terms, split it up into separate words, look for “word 1 in table X columns A B C & D, AND word 2 in table X columns A B C & D, AND word 3 in table X columns A B C & D
**” etc. Plus ideally it would then - after showing those results - show the “or” version of this.
Why do I suddenly feel like my “no code” adventure with AppSheet is just turning into my standard PHP/MySQL coding? 
Hmmmm anyone made these sorts of search expressions before?
Toby
Try:
FILTER(
"table",
ISNOTBLANK(
INTERSECT(
SPLIT(TRIM([_THISROW].[search terms]), " "),
(
SPLIT(TRIM([search target column 1]), " "))
+ SPLIT(TRIM([search target column 2]), " "))
...
+ SPLIT(TRIM([search target column N]), " "))
)
)
)
)
Note that punctuators will confound the search some, as the SPLIT() above is strictly on (single) spaces.
Yup.
See also:
Thanks again Steve for your help!
It’s working, except it only wants to search the “NAME” column. As you can see below, I’m trying to search NAME, STARNUM and DESCR_SIMPLE columns.
I tried adding an “OR” but it gave an error. Help me, oh wise one! ;-))
LINKTOFILTEREDVIEW(“L2_items_bottom_listphotos”,
ISNOTBLANK(
INTERSECT(
SPLIT(TRIM([_THISROW].[SearchInput]), " "),
(
(SPLIT(TRIM([NAME]), " ")
SPLIT(TRIM([STARNUM]), " ")
SPLIT(TRIM([DESCR_SIMPLE]), " ")
)
))
)
)
Brilliant! It’s working!! Thanks!!
LINKTOFILTEREDVIEW(“L2_items_bottom_listphotos”,
ISNOTBLANK(
INTERSECT(
SPLIT(TRIM([_THISROW].[SearchInput]), " "),
(
(SPLIT(TRIM([NAME]), " ")
+SPLIT(TRIM([STARNUM]), " ")
+SPLIT(TRIM([DESCR_SIMPLE]), " ")
)
))
)
)
The + trips me up because it’s a plus but it’s actually an “or”, sorta. lol.
Please don’t waste your Saturday replying to this today lol - but my next question is… If any of the columns contain “butter”, and I search for “but”, it doesn’t return a result. Looking through all the functions, I’m assuming I need to add some sort of “contains” function. I’m just not sure where! lol
Seems to me that INTERSECT is doing the heavy lifting in the statement, yes? It’s finding whether there is any “commonality” between my search form’s input and some columns in the table. And I need to tell it to “don’t just look for exact matches, but partial matches are fine”. Hmmm.
How I spent my weekend…
https://www.appsheet.com/samples/community28312?appGuidString=2ea965d7-8656-4d9d-a9d2-ed3dc5ca5813
Thanks for the inspiration!
Thank you Steve. I would gently suggest you open up new thread with tips and tricks category so that this sample app stands out! 
