Using Advanced Search

The Advanced Search feature enables you to perform searches for the following items, depending on your privileges:

Work items in the selected application and items in auxiliary tables that you can view.
Archived work items for the selected application.
Notes and attachments (e-mail messages, files, and URLs) in primary and auxiliary tables.

Your administrator determines which fields can be searched on the Advanced Search page.

Searching for Items Using Advanced Search

Select the application that contains the items that you want to find.
Click the Search icon, and then select Advanced Search.
Select the table that you want to search from the list.
By default, this drop-down list contains the primary table associated with the selected application. Auxiliary tables, archived tables, and the Notes/Attachments table may also be available, depending on your privileges.
Specify keyword(s) to search for in Text fields that are set up for keyword searching by your administrator. Keyword searching is provided for all search types.
For note/attachment searches, you can search for keywords contained in the title of notes and attachments, and in the body of notes and e-mail messages.
For work item and archived item searches, select a project or multiple projects that contain the items that you are looking for.
Set search criteria for individual fields. Your administrator determines which fields are available for primary and auxiliary tables, including archived primary tables.

Your search results are returned as a list of items.

Note: For note/attachment searches, the Associated Attachments column contains notes and attachments that meet your search criteria and that you have privileges to view. Because certain privileges are checked only for the results page that you are viewing, the total number of records shown in search results is always an approximation.

Tips for Searching for Fields on the Advanced Search Page

The following tips apply to specifying search criteria for these fields:

Search results are based on all search criteria. For example, if you specify keywords and select a particular user from the Owner field, items that contain both the keywords AND are owned by the user you selected are returned.
To improve performance for a keyword search, specify additional search parameters for fields. For example, refine your search criteria by specifying a date range for submit dates.
The project that you select determines which values are available for selection-type fields, such as User fields and the State field. This applies only to fields that are not set as searchable. Project selection has no effect on relational fields.
Field-level dependencies are available on the Advanced Search page. If both the independent and dependent fields of a dependency are placed on the Advanced Search page, the dependency as established in the selected project is honored.
Depending on administrative settings and the number of values available for selection-type fields, you may be able to search for values. If a search icon is available next to a field, enter the search criteria, and then click the icon to perform the search. Any matches populate the drop-down list for you to make a selection.
You can select multiple values for selection-type fields. For single selection fields, such as User and the State field, all items containing one of the specified values are returned. For multi-selection fields, such as Multi-User and Multi-Relational fields, all items containing any of the specified values are returned.
If the Item ID field is available, you can type the entire Item ID, including prefix, or only the numeric ID.
If the Active/Inactive field is available, the default selection is determined by the Advanced Lookup Defaults option in your user profile. You can change this default selection as needed.
You can narrow the dates for your search criteria by using the greater-than-or-equal to operator (>=) or less-than operator (<) available with Date/Time fields.
You can use date/time keywords to specify search criteria for Date/Time fields.
Text fields included on the Advanced Search page are treated differently than keyword searching. Items containing the search criteria are returned, but phrases must be exact. For example, if you search for the phrase "server crashes on reboot," that exact phrase must be available in the Text field that you are searching for an item to be returned.