Quandora’s #HiddenFeatures series – Search Syntaxes

As our community is well aware of, we are constantly bringing improvements to our product. We made a habit out of having releases every two weeks or so in order to stay fresh and in tandem with our customers’ needs and expectations.

Along with fixes and various integrations, our releases are mainly focused on adding new features that improve Quandora’s users interaction with the platform and their overall experience. For instance, in our latest release we included the “Ask again” function (available to Knowledge Base Editors and Managers) that pushes the question on the top of the most recent questions list, therefore giving it a renewed visibility. We also plan to add a “pinning” option in the near future, so that domain and Knowledge Base Managers can “stick” specific questions, thus promoting the most relevant content for their users.

However, our platform has some surprise elements as well, or what we call “hidden features”. On of these #hiddenfeatures is the various search syntaxes available in Quandora.

Quandora is using Elasticsearch as indexing engine and we support advanced queries in the elasticsearch query string format.
For more information about the Elasticsearch query string syntax go here.

To perform a query string search you must start your query with a “!” sign.
For example the following query search for all the questions containing “JavaScript” which were asked by the author Elizabeth Prince:

! author:Elizabeth Prince AND javascript

There’s a whole list of the fields indexed by Quandora that can be used in query string searches:

• base (i.e. the base ID)
• title
• content
• comments (i.e. concatenation of all question comments)
• answers (i.e. concatenation of all answers and answer comments)
• answersCount
• author (i.e. “FirstName LastName”)
• authorId
• contributors (ids of users who contributed to this question: answer and comment authors)
• tags (i.e. list of tag names of the question)
• tagIds (i.e. list of tag ids of the question)
• created (i.e. the creation date – a date-time filed)
• modified (i.e. the last modification date – a date-time field)
• votes
• answerVotes
• totalVotes

So for example you can do a search like this: ! tag:(javascript AND Ajax) OR forms that will return all questions tagged with javascript and Ajax or that have “forms” in content:

Users can also use the special parameter {{me}} when using query string searches. {{me}} will be replaced with the current user ID.

For example:
! authorId:{{me}} is similar to the “My Questions” filter search

! contributors:{{me}} is similar to the “My Contributions” filter search

! contributors:{{me}} AND NOT authorId:{{me}} will search for all questions answered or commented by {{me}} (but not asked by {{me}})

You should know that the built-in filters are faster than query string searches. Query string searches are useful to create new type of searches that are not covered by built-in filters.

That’s it for our first Hidden Features post.

Hope you found it useful and stay tuned for new information about how to make the best out of your Quandora experience.

Happy Knowledge Sharing!