Search submissions

Back when Form Tools 1.4.4 was introduced - back in the late paleolithic era - a new search bar appeared at the top of the submission listings page for clients and administrators. It provides you with a simple but powerful tool for searching your form submissions.

Changes from 2.0.x

2.1.0 introduced a few improvements to the search bar.

1. Hiding the search bar. Depending on your data set, sometimes you simply don't need the search functionality - it's rare, but it can happen. Or, perhaps you are charging client access to the script and want to limit functionality based on a subscription model. To hide the search bar altogether, simply uncheck all "Searchable" checkboxes for the fields in the View (under Edit Form -> Views tab -> Edit View -> Fields sub-tab). The page will automatically recognize that there are no searchable fields and hide the search bar.
2. Date fields. Secondly, the way the search bar handles date fields has changed. In 2.1.0, the Date field type is a first class citizen. The Core Submission Date and Last Modified Date fields are no longer the only fields that may utilize the javascript datepicker. Now you can set ANY of your form fields to be date fields. As such, when you select any form field that's set to a Date, it now shows a Select Date / Date Range field. The old date range dropdown in 2.0.x has been removed in favour of this. When you click on the Date Range field, a javascript dropdown will appear listing various search options. You may use the functionality there to search by individual dates, pre-set date ranges or specific date ranges. It's very powerful, and very easy to use!

Available Search Options

The first dropdown box in the search bar contains the various database fields you can search. The actual fields that appear in that dropdown depend on your current View. It only lets you search fields in the current View that are marked as "Searchable". The options can be grouped into the following:

• All fields: lets you search the entire database for a specific keyword.
• Custom field: lets you search for a string in a single form field. All of your searchable View fields are listed.
• Date / Last Modified: this option, when selected, pops open an additional dropdown menu containing the search-by-date options. The new dropdown option contains various options such as "Last day", "Last week" and "Last Month" as well as a search-by-month option. If you are running Form Tools on a slow server and/or have a extremely high volume of submissions in your form, you can use the search-by-month option to export the data on a monthly basis, rather than all at once - which can sometimes cause server timeouts. The "specific months" section lists the last 12 months starting with the current month. If the earliest submission in your form was 3 months ago, you will only see three months listed - no more.
• IP Address: this is handy way to quickly locate all submissions made by a single user.

Search Tips

• Enter a SINGLE search keyword. Multiple words will be regarded as a single string, making it less likely you'll find a match.
• To reset the form submission listings page to its default sort order, listing all submissions, click the "Show All" button at any time. If your current result set doesn't contain all the items (e.g. you did a search for "Phil" which returns 4 of the 14 total submissions), the "Show All" button becomes bold. This serves as a visual aid to  remind you you're not viewing all the submissions made through the form.