SQL server native full-text search

Full-text indexing is a database capability and needs to be supported and enabled in the database.

🛈 Tip
Contact your database vendor for information on how to enable this on your database.

Service (formerly known as eJournal) has had this functionality available since version 4.7. From CRM 7, this functionality is now also available on some fields in Sales & Marketing Win and Web client.

If full-text search is enabled on the database, it will use special search syntax when searching for the following entities:

In Service

  • Request content (title and message text)
  • Knowledge base FAQ articles
  • Quick search field, when searching request titles

In Sales & Marketing

All long text fields like appointment text, yellow notes, descriptions.

🛈 Note
This is not a replacement for our full-text search since it only works on specific fields, as part of the structured search system (Find)

The new full-text search functionality works differently than ordinary (much slower) text search, and there are some differences in search behavior. Using the classic text search the database would match against any record that contains your text query anywhere. With the new full-text search capability, the text is portioned into words, and the words need to match – a part of a word will not match.

This table illustrates the different search behavior when searching for “enigma”:

Words in the databaseMatch classic text searchMatch new full-text search
EnigmaYesYes
EnigmaticYesNo
UnenigmaticYesNo

The speed of the search is highly dependent on the kind of search functionality you use.  In a database with a lot of requests and messages, a request content search can take several minutes to complete using the classic search functionality. With the new full-text search functionality enabled it usually takes less than a second to complete such a query.

To get full-text search capability, you need to enable the Microsoft Indexing Service on the MSSQL server.  If it’s not installed, you need to install it.

TableFields
messagesearch_title, body, html_body
ticket title
kb_entrytitle, question, answer, keywords
texttext

Turn on full-text search on an existing database

Dbsetup will detect if full-text search is set up or not. If you have turned on the full-text search on an existing database, you have to do a rebuild of the database to get the functionality working.