Searching assets

A default full-text search engine looks for assets that contain filled-out text fields, the search engine returns the result starting with the request.

The text field is filled-out with the text “Nebula is the best media asset management in the observable Universe.” We can find this text with the request eg. Neb bes manag unive. However, we cannot use the expression gement.

If we want to find a particular string within the word, we have to put an asterisk (*) in front of the query. Asterix is a wildcard that matches zero or more characters. Likewise, we can use a question mark (?) which substitutes just for one character.

Let us have two assets. One asset contains the expression antibiotic anywhere in the text field. Another asset contains probiotic. If we search biotic, nothing will return. While *biotic returns both expressions.

There is a difference when searching is on the basis of a particular key and not in all text fields. It is possible to search for asset titles only:

Expression title:program returns the only asset named literally program, and not eg. Cool program.

If we want to find more assets, we can use the asterisk again. But the asterisk must be used in front of and behind the request. In the previous example with “antibiotic” and “probiotic”:

• title:biotic returns nothing
• title:*biotic* returns both
• title:anti* returns “antibiotic”
• title:*bio??? finds “antibiotic”, “probiotic”, “superbiotic”, but not “antibiotics”, as we used three question marks for just three characters at the end of the expression.

A database key must be used. The list of keys can be found at Nebula web interface, settings/keys section. The most popular are:

• title - asset title
• subtitle - asset subtitle
• description - asset description
• notes - asset notes
• id/main - primary identifier, eg. IDEC

Note: For full-text searching Nebula uses automatic character transliteration. The literary expression must be used for searching among particular database keys.

If there is an asset with its title Толстой, a request tolstoy finds the asset, however, title:tolstoy would not work.

The same goes for characters with diacritics, special graphene, Chinese, Sanskrit, Klingon, Quenya, etc.

The wildcard usage can be widely combined. So if we use title:*(?/??) Nebula will find assets with their titles ends up with an indication of episode and season from (1/10) to (9/99). When we use an asterisk instead of the question mark there will be no limitation in the number of characters.