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Advanced Search: Subject Line Search
Idea shared by Wes H. - 10/21/2014 at 1:27 PM
Completed
Noticed that the "Subject Line" field under the Advanced Search option is missing after the latest update to version 10.3.5406.21074.
 
Was this as designed, or did something go wrong?
 
Being able to Advance Search emails by Subject Line is extremely helpful, hopefully this is a glitch.
 
Anyone else notice this or can any Smarter Tools employee's shed some light on this?

21 Replies

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2
I too noticed this, Wes.  Was curious if this was by design as well.  The "Subject Line" search was extremely useful to us.  Didn't see anything in release notes indicating this feature had been removed.
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Andrea Free Replied
Employee Post
Hi Wes,
 
This is by design and will be included in the release notes for the minor version. The Search String field already searches the ticket body, subject and notes so having a Subject field was a little redundant. If you move your search to the Search String field, however, you should still find the ticket in your results.
 
Andrea Free SmarterTools Inc. 877-357-6278 www.smartertools.com
4
I would disagree, Andrea. The search string feature of advance search returns too many results to be accurate, if any at all. The subject line search was much more accurate. For example, if users include a customer order number in each email subject line. The user can easily search the subject line field and return a couple results, where as the search string field would return many results, some times none at all.
 
While the programmers may have found it redundant, it was not hurting anything and was actually quite useful, so why remove it? How can this feature be reintroduced or how can the search string field be more accurate?
4
This has been an issue with me as well. I am hoping that Smarter Tools will bring back the Subject line Advance Search option.
 
As Wes and Eric both stated... sometimes using the Search String method will bring up too many results. I include certain information in the subject line of my emails and using the Subject line search was a very important resource for me which I have now lost. :(
 
Any help that Smarter Tools can provide regarding this would be great!
 
 
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Hi Andrea,
 
Thank you for the replying to this thread. 
 
Using "Search String" provides far too many results when searching for a specific ticket. 
 
You'd indicated in your reply that using the "Search String" field "searches the ticket body, subject, and notes."  It would seem that by design this is more taxing on the server rather than searching one specific field.   By that rationale, why not remove all other search fields aside from "Search String" ?
 
Perhaps one field with a dropdown box could resolve this?  The drop down could include Ticket Number, Search String, E-mail Address. etc.
 
The removal of this feature makes it much more difficult for us to locate specific tickets. 
 
Thank you again for your response and for taking this feedback into account.
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This is an issue for us too - the Search String search produces far too many results whereas the Subject line allowed for more narrow and therefore more accurate results.  Please restore it!
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Not only an issue with providing way too many results. It's taxing the server. Notes, Description and Subject fields for thousands of tickets? We generate 12 to 15k calls a month for just one brand.
 
A lot of times people are just giving up waiting for it to give results back and cancel.
 
Can this be put back the way it was? Until SmarterTrack does a overhaul of it's very limited search system, you shouldn't be combining so many fields together. It gives terrible, unreliable results, and is very heavy on server resources for what seems to be very little if any gain.
2
Agreed. Smarter Track search has always been a problem for us and now it's even less useful.
 
Another big problem we have is that we often need to search for email addresses within the text body of emails. However, when using the Search String field it takes the @ sign and the period (.) as a space.
 
I have no idea why it does this - it turns what could potentially be a really useful feature into something non-functional. So, for example, searching for john.brown@gmail.com in the Search String field returns the following:
- All instances of gmail.com addresses
- All instances of john
- All instances of brown
 
In other words, it's completely useless as a means of filtering for that email address!
 
Why is this important? Because, in common with many websites, emails coming in from some of our contact forms have a 'from' address of contact_form@ourdomain.com with the customer's email address as one of the fields listed in the body of the email (this helps avoid problems if they mistype their email address - otherwise the mail server would reject the whole incoming support request because of a malformed 'from' address). So, we can't use the Email search (because that only searches the message address fields) and we have to resort to this annoying wildcard interpretation of the @ and period symbols.
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I'd just like to state that I restored the subject functionality to my version of SmarterTrack by copying all files EXCEPT frmTicket.aspx from /Management/Tickets directory from 10.2.5364 over to my version (10.4.5448)
 
For some reason, copying over frmTicket.aspx from 10.2.5364 broke the transfer button.
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Troy, this doesn't seem to actually restore the functionality - only the Subject Search text box. In fact, that can be restored by just copying over the one line for the text box in frmTicketSearch.aspx (line 30). However, when I then use the Subject Search, it ignores the text entered, so it's not usable for us. However, I can't locate the code-behind files to then wire the rest of this up: I'm guessing they must be compiled into a DLL somewhere. Also, I have a bit of an aversion to meddling with code I didn't write that's as complex as SmarterTrack. Really appreciate your efforts - please let us know if the functionality is working for you. Would be great to have a reply from a SmarterTools staff member to let us know whether they plan to restore this...
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Andrea, any update on whether this can be restored? There are a lot of us who are experiencing big business impact from this having been removed. We have a 13GB database and trying to search that from the general Search String field is a bad joke!
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Andrea Free Replied
Employee Post
Thank you all for your feedback. I've brought your concerns to the development team, and they are discussing a solution for a future version. One note that may provide some reassurance - When doing a search using the Search String field, the subject text is weighted much higher than others. So while there's not a Subject field, the results with a matching subject should appear higher on the list of results.
 
Thanks!
Andrea Free SmarterTools Inc. 877-357-6278 www.smartertools.com
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Hi Andrea, I think I speak for all of us in thanking you for taking this to the dev team. Thanks also for pointing out the weighting of the subject line in results. However, our experience is that this doesn't help much - our staff report problems finding tickets using this and it's literally costing us money in the extra time they spend trying to find matching tickets (and emailing each other to try to locate a ticket - see the related discussion here which explains why the lack of phrase searching causes such huge numbers of results to be returned: http://portal.smartertools.com/community/a643/smartertrack-should-handle-search-queries-like-google-does.aspx). Anything you can do to persuade the dev team that this is a big issue for us is very much appreciated!
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Agreed with what Cycle said. Thank you for bringing this to their attention. SmarterTrack's search system really needs some TLC because right now it's costing us money as well with the amount of time it takes agents to locate Call Logs and Tickets. And we have Live Chat starting up next week, so it'll be in the same boat. Since they are, I'm sure, working hard on v11.x, please tell them that search really needs some help.
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Cycle and Sergio are right
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I yesterday updated to 10.5 from 10.0 and I came across to same issue like you guys... It's very antiquated and it's not providing you adequate result when u have datasize of 16 GB and handling more then 5 department. the pain area is it will not allowed you to sort so you will have to scroll and check each and every entry. More over 11 Beta doesn't give more hope that this issue get resolved... seriously need some help here
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I'm really disappointed that this is still just 'Under Consideration' after the recent update and hasn't been moved to be a work in progress by the Dev team. It's a major weak area for SmarterTrack which was made considerably worse when they removed the very functional Subject Line search. My company writes software - we're well aware that search is a big issue for everybody using any kind of database system and now we're having to suffer the consequences of inadequate search in SmarterTrack, which is frustrating. At this rate I'll end up pulling one of our developers off paid projects and having them write a search interface ourselves for the Smarter Track database but I'd much prefer not to have that expense and disruption to our other projects when we're paying for a SmarterTrack Maintenance Agreement every year... Perhaps Andrea could update us on what the 'Under Consideration' label actually means in this case?
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Andrea Free Replied
Employee Post
Hello all,
 
Thank you for your discussion on this thread. We appreciate the user input.
 
After extensive internal discussions, including discussions stemmed from input from the user community, we've added an alternative solution for the advanced search by subject. Information on this can be found below, as well as in the 10.x Release Notes for version 10.6.5549:
 
  • ADDED: Advanced search pages now allow users to filter their search term to certain locations (e.g. subjects, comments, etc.).
Please understand that we realize there is still functionality you'd like to see available. We're discussing improvements that can be made and are working to continue making it better for you. 
 
Thank you,
Andrea Free SmarterTools Inc. 877-357-6278 www.smartertools.com
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Andrea Free Replied
Employee Post
Hi all,
 
I know this thread has been marked as completed and the subject line search has been added back to SmarterTrack, but I'd just like to let you all know that there is another thread available for discussing SmarterTrack's search functionality. We'd like to centralize the conversation in order to prep for the next major version of SmarterTrack. Please reference this thread for continuing SmarterTrack's search discussion or to offer your input: http://portal.smartertools.com/community/a86741/discussion-smartertracks-search-functionality.aspx
 
Thank you! 
 
Andrea Free SmarterTools Inc. 877-357-6278 www.smartertools.com
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We have found the Search String field is very useful searching for our tickets because it searches in the body, subject and notes, however the aggravating and unorganized part of that feature is not being able to organize the results at least by date(started - that’s the main one we need to organize with)... it would be nice if we could organize by columns up top such as by date (started column), status, and idle time, the others up top would be nice too but the ones we would search by for sure would be date (started column), status, and idle time. I want to see the oldest to newest tickets a customer may have. Yes the advanced search with specific custom fields lets you organize by date, but our issue is if the variable wasn't added to the custom field in the ticket in the first place, or if it’s a ticket that does not use that custom field the ticket will not show in our search results so we do not see all tickets associated with cx name "x" for example. To ensure a ticket is not missed in the lineup being able to organize the search string results by date(started)  is imperative for us. 
 
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User Replied
Hello Dustin,
This feature is currently being worked on.
Thank you,
-Ashley

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