Help:Help on searching

From DocR21

The quickest way to find information in the Spatial Product Documentation is to look it up directly. On the left-hand side of your screen, the Navigation Side Bar contains a Search box with two buttons under it labeled Go and Search.

When you select either the Go or Search button and the page you are looking for does not exist, you will be presented with a list of articles that match your search criteria (or a message that no matches were found).

Contents 1 How the Search Works 1.1 Go 1.2 Search 2 Restricting the Search 2.1 Namespace 2.2 Exact Phrase 3 Alternative Searching Method

How the Search Works

The behavior differences between the Go and the Search buttons are as follows:

Go

• Only the article page titles are searched. Namespaces are part of the page title.
• The page title search is case-sensitive.

Search

• Only the article content is searched - the page title is ignored.
• The article content is searched in its raw (wikitext) form - that is, it searches the text that appears in the edit box when you click "edit", not the rendered page. This means that content coming from an included template will not be picked up, but the target of piped links will be.
• Even if you enclose a phrase in quotes, not only will the search locate the exact phrase, but also looks for each word individually. For example, if you enter "platforms and compilers" it will return pages that contain "platforms" and "and" and "compilers".
• The content search is not case-sensitive, so "InterOp", "interop", "Interop", and "INTEROP" all give the same result.

Restricting the Search

If you click the Go button without filling in anything, you will be taken to "Special:Search" which gives you extra searching options (also available from any search results list).

Namespace

You may find it useful to restrict a search to pages within a particular namespace, for example, only search within the "InterOp:" pages or the "Talk:" (comments) pages. Methods for searching within a namespace are as follows:

• Tick the namespaces you require for this search. The namespaces are listed at the bottom of your Search results page.
• From the Search box in the Navigation Side Bar, you can search within a particular namespace with the format Namespace:keyword, for example:

SchemeExt:api_split_periodic_faces

The Search results page lists the page SchemeExt:Solid:split (which is the Scheme extension that call this API).

By default only the namespaces specified in your preferences will be searched. Logged-in users can change their preferences to specify the namespaces they want to search by default.

Note: If you want to immediately extend your search throughout additional namespaces, then you can tick the namespaces at the bottom of your search results page.

Exact Phrase

As mentioned briefly above, you may enclose a phrase in double quotation marks (" "). The search will locate pages having content with the exact phrase (including punctuation such as underscores). This restrictive search, in turn, reduces the number of returned results.

Alternative Searching Method

External third-party search engines may be used to locate keywords and key phrases within a specific site. For example, if you prefer using the Google search engine, you could perform searches within the online Spatial Product Documentation site using the site: search:

site:doc.spatial.com surface normal

The search results include links to pages (both technical articles in wiki format and library reference documentation in HTML) having either "surface normal" (ranked highest), as well as pages having just "surface" or just "normal" in its content.

If you want the results to list pages having the key phrase in its entirety, then you would enter:

site:doc.spatial.com "surface normal"