Special characters in search terms

Hi everyone,

At our organization, one of our significant programs has a hyphen in its name: W-2. One of our users let us know that searching for this name did not bring up any results, even though there are many assets, and even a domain, whose full names include W-2.

I tried it, and he was right, searching for W-2 fails. However, “W-2” in quotes works, and W 2 without the hyphen also works.

Looking at the product documentation, the hyphen symbol is not listed as a wildcard. Are there any settings that we can adjust to make sure searches using it are processed correctly?

Thank you,
Yasmin

Former User

Posted 5 years ago · Edited 2 years ago·Last reply 5 years ago

3 comments

Former User

OP5 years ago · Edited

Thank you for your messages!

Tom - I submitted a ticket. Good luck to you, too!

Tom Friesen

·5 years ago · Edited

Hi Yasmin,

This is a bug that Collibra has been slow to acknowledge. I have an open ticket, which has been unresolved for weeks: the dash acts neither like a whitespace character, nor a standard character in Collibra searches. For consistency, it should act like one of the two. Unless one specifies the exact match in the search field, nothing is returned if you include a dash.

For example, our own conventions promote the use of “full-time” as opposed to “full time”. Also with report prefixes for naming conventions. However, the current implementation in Collibra makes this governance very difficult, as people cannot have successful results nor autocomplete when the include the dash.

This may be technologically explainable — though I have yet to hear it —, but it is unjustifiable, as it is antithetical to user expectations. And modifying the tokenizer for this one causes other issues. Google wouldn’t be around very long if their search engine behaviours were like this…

For anyone else with users experiencing these difficulties, I would recommend opening a ticket. You can also reference ours: #57270.

Good luck,
Tom

danbsales

·5 years ago · Edited

Hi Yasmin, I believe you can edit the tokenizer setting to allow Collibra to search special characters. This link may help:
https://productresources.collibra.com/docs/install/5.7/#Console/Infrastructure/DGCService/Configuration/ta_edit-tokenizer-settings.htm?Highlight=tokenizer

Good luck!