Saturday, April 11, 2009

Some Global Search Ideas

If you've been running in NetSuite for a while, the number of records coming back on saved searches gets large. Here's a few tips to help you:

Prefixes

To narrow global search results to records of a single type, use a search prefix made up of some or all of the letters of a standard or custom record type name plus a colon, for example: "cu:" for customer searches, or "it:" for item searches. The whole record name works to help you in some cases, like: "invoice:1002". If you had typed "inv:1002" you would have inventory items in the returns as well as invoices.

Inactive Records

Want to include inactive records? Put a "+" after the keywords; for example, "cu:acme+" will return both active and inactive customers with records containing the letters "acme".

Exact Match

You can get returns limited to those that exactly match your input. Put quotation marks around your keyword. Enter cu:"john" to search for customers with a name of John. Customers with names containing the letters john, like Johnson, Johnston, or Johnny Walker, are not returned. Don't worry about numeric keywords; they automatically return only exact matches. You might have returns of several transaction types with the same number though, so see above about prefixes.

Non-exact Match for Numeric Searches

You can get a list of non-exact matches for your numeric keyword searches by using the wildcard "%". For example, if you wanted to see all inventory items containing the number "100," you can search on "inventory:100%". This returns all inventory items that have the number 100 in their name.

New Window

If you don't want to lose the record you're on while you go look at another record you need to search for, add an extra colon between the prefix and the search string. Your results will open in a new browser window. You could combine this with a wildcard too; as in, "inventory::120%" which would open a new browser window displaying the list of inventory items with name/numbers containing the digits 120.

Happy searching!

Another great tip from one of our favourite contributors, Jay!