StoresWWW Search Help

Help on Stores WWW Inventory Search Page

The stores inventory search page allows you to run active searches against the inventory list in the Physics Stores. Note this just runs against the list of active part numbers and descriptions, and does not imply that the items displayed are actually in stock at that time.

This search is a tad slow, and if you are simply looking for all parts in one store containing a particular word, you may prefer to use the static parts indices which will list parts indexed by just about any word in their description.

Some guidelines for using the search page:

You must enter a search criteria. The more parts your search criteria matches, the longer it will take to display the results.
The criteria for:
- the store the part is in
- the range the part number is in
- the text in the part description
are all treated separately and then ANDed together. By default, the search covers both stores, and the part number range includes all parts. Unless you enter something in a text description field, the search does not restrict based on part descriptions. So if you ask for all electronics store parts and give the range 100-105, a part must both be in the electronics store and have a part number between 100 and 105 (inclusive) to be listed, regardless of the descriptions. If you add any constraints on the description, those must be matched in addition to any constraints on store and part number.
The part number range is inclusive, thus if you enter 100 and 105, parts 100 and 105 are eligible to match, as well as any part numbers between them. Leave the upper or lower part number blank to get all part numbers above or below, respectively, some part number to be selected.

The text description criteria allow for somewhat complicated searches, which can be confusing. All of the criteria on the part descriptions are combined into a single condition, which must be met in addition to any criteria on the store or part numbers for an item to get listed.

All of the part description line fields for which you enter text are used in the combined description criterion. You must fill in the text fields from top to bottom without leaving any blanks between filled fields; i.e. if you only fill two fields, they must be the first and second text fields, not first and third.

In the text field, certain punctuation marks will be quietly deleted for security reasons. Any leading or trailing spaces, percent signs, or underscores will also be quietly removed. Percent signs can be used as wild cards matching any number of characters, underscores as wild cards matching exactly one character. You can only use these wild cards in the middle of an expression, e.g. BATTERY % VOLT will match both BATTERY 1.5 VOLT and BATTERY 9 VOLT but not 9 VOLT BATTERY. Case is ignored and anything you type gets converted to uppercase.

You cannot use wildcards at the start or end of the text; for these searches use the middle drop down to select the type of match. The default, Containing the string will find the search text anywhere in the description. Starting with the string requires the text to be found at the start of the part description, and Ending with the string requires it to be at the end. There are also negations available which will match any part where the text does not appear, or does not appear at the start or end of the description. Note: currently, a number of part descriptions end with a number of spaces, and cause the Ending with the string and its negative twin to not match what you would expect. This is not a bug in the search application, but with the part descriptions in the database.

You can enter multiple text fields in your search. How this is interpretted depends on the first drop down box. By default, all the description conditions are ANDed together (and then ANDed with any part number or store restrictions). Thus, assuming the match for both are set to Containing ..., with text fields battery and volt, then both BATTERY 1.5 VOLT and 9 VOLT BATTERY would match, but AAA BATTERY and VOLTMETER would not match. Changing the operator dropdown on the second to either OR (lo) or OR (hi) would cause all four to match.

Why are there two OR operators? It is a matter of precedence, allowing for more complicated searches, and only matters if your search is using at least three text fields and you are using both ANDs and ORs (either type). Basically, all of your search criteria on part descriptions are combined from top to bottom in order left to right. All of this is wrapped in parentheses, and ANDed with any restrictions on store or part number to get the actual search condition. You are unable to group operations with parentheses, but to mitigate this, we provided two OR operators, one with low precedence (OR (lo) or the normal OR precedence in boolean logic) and a high precedence one (OR (hi), which has a higher precedence than AND).

Thus, the criteria

and Containing the string "BATTERY"
AND Containing the string "AAA"
OR (lo) Containing the string "VOLT"

will match any part description containing both the words BATTERY and AAA, e.g. AAA BATTERY. It will also match any part with the text VOLT, e.g. 9 VOLT BATTERY or VOLTMETER, whether they contain the words battery or aaa or not. Mathematically, it is

( (contains BATTERY) and (contains AAA) ) or (contains VOLT)

In constrast, the conditions

and Containing the string "BATTERY"
AND Containing the string "AAA"
OR (hi) Containing the string "VOLT"

evaluates to

(contains BATTERY) and ( (contains AAA) or (contains VOLT) )

and so will only match parts containing the word BATTERY in their description which also contain either the word VOLT or AAA. Thus it will match all the examples in the previous case above except VOLTMETER.

If this precedence talk confuses you, just ignore it and make sure you only use all ANDs or all ORs (you do not need to worry which OR).

The initial, darkened AND is just to remind you that the total search conditions on the part descriptions gets ANDed with the part number and store restrictions, and you can ignore it. (In particular, if you do not understand the precedence issues, you can still do all ORs, that AND does not count.)