Tech Tip: Advanced Search Using ParentName and ChildName

Laserfiche provides many search options to allow users to quickly locate the documents they want. Advanced searches gives users even more power when trying to locate documents by providing additional advanced search types and allowing users to combine searches in a variety of ways. Two advanced searches that give more flexibility in locating documents are the ParentName and ChildName searches.

In many repositories, certain folders are repeated throughout the repository. For example, each employee might have “Review” and “Insurance” folders within their personal folder in the “Human Resources” section of the repository. A set of folders containing purchase information might have an “Invoices” and “Shipping Information” folders for each customer. Users might want to search for documents within these folders, but the standard Within Folder search would require users to search each folder individually.

Instead, users can apply the ParentName search type. This search locates all documents with parent folder matching a particular name. Like all search types, it can be combined with other searches to pinpoint exact documents.

For example, to find all documents in folders called “Insurance” with the tag “Annual Update,” the following syntax could be used:

({LF:ParentName=”Insurance”} & {LF:Tags=”Annual Update”})

The search would search for and return documents with that tag in each employee’s “Insurance” folder, regardless of its location in the folder tree. Unrelated documents with that tag in the “Accounting” folder would not be returned.

The ChildName search type returns all folders that contain a document with the specified name. For example, a user might want to locate all “Shipping Information” folders that have field values that indicate that they have not been shipped and include the “Expedited Service Request” form, so that they can be processed first.

The following syntax could be used:

({LF:ChildName=”Expedited Service Request”} & {[]:[]=”Not Yet Shipped”})