Advanced Search Techniques

The PTC eSupport portal provides access to articles from our technical support engineers, software performance reports (SPRs), community documents, and much more.  Here are some tips to help you get started.

Basic Search Tips

1. You Can search by Document ID
   If you know the ID of an Article (e.g. CS143545), SPR, or any other document type, just search for that number.  Your matching document will appear right at the top of the results. 

2. All Words Matter
   By default, PTC's search engine will only return results which match every word in your query. 

3. Non-Word Characters Are Ignored
   Numbers, punctuation such as periods and commas, as well as special characters such as an underscore are ignored. In fact, @#$%^&()=+[ will all be ignored and treated as spaces. 

4. Case Is Ignored
   PTC's search isn't case-sensitive.  A search for Creo Parametric Direct and Layout will return the same results as creo parametric direct and layout.

5. Search The Error
   If you're looking for a specific issue and you have an error message, use as many specific terms from the message as possible. Use copy & paste from the application or log file to avoid typos.

Query Language

For more refined searches, special functions and operators are available.  All operator terms must be in capital letters.

Exact Phrases

If you want to match an exact phrase, wrap it in quotation marks.  Words within double quotes must match exactly, in order, and with no other words between them.

Example: "differential equation"

Wildcards

If you want to be sure to get variations of the term you are looking for, or if you are not sure about spelling, use a wildcard "*". The wildcard asterisk must be the last character of a word.

Example: product*  will match ProductLink, ProductPoint, as well as any other word beginning with product.

Proximity Operators

A proximity operator is similar to using quotation marks, but gives you a little more flexibility.  If you want to match words which will be very close to one another, but not necessarily right next to each other, you can use a proximity operator.

NEAR

The NEAR operator (again, always upper case) matches the results where the specified search terms are within close proximity to each other, without preserving the order of the terms.  You can specify how close the two terms must be in the matching documents using a (n=#) setting where n is the number of words between the first and second keywords.  The value for n must be a positive integer and the default is 8.

Example: Windchill NEAR(n=4) analytics

ONEAR

The ONEAR operator is almost identical to NEAR, except it preserves the order of the terms.  In the example above, analytics could appear within 4 words before or after Windchill.  If you want analytics to always appear after Windchill in your search results, use ONEAR.

Example: Windchill ONEAR(n=4) analytics

Boolean Operators

By default, all words for which you search will be in the matching documents.  You can change this feature by using the Boolean operators: ANY, OR, NOT, and AND.  If you use these, they must always be upper case.

Example: mean OR average deviation 

Example: ANY(width length height)

Synonym Operators

PTC has pre-loaded many synonyms into the search index.  The most common use for the synonym operator is with acronyms.  If you want two words treated identically, you can use the WORDS operator.  This will provide slightly different results than the OR Boolean operator.  Normally, WORDS only accepts two single words.  If you want to use a phrase with this operator, it must be wrapped in quotes.

Example: WORDS(jvm, "java virtual machine")

Property Restriction

The refiners to the left of the search results allow most forms of property restriction.  However, two additional (case-sensitive) options are available to narrow your search results even further.  Property restrictions accept only one value, so you may need to use Boolean operators to define multiple requirements.

LastModifiedTime

If you're looking for a very specific date range, you can use the LastModifiedTime restriction.  The format for dates should be M/D/YYYY.

Example: LastModifiedTime>=1/1/2013 AND LastModifiedTime<=12/31/2013

Title

If you want your search terms to only match in the title (and not check the actual content of the document), you should use the Title property restriction.

Example: Title:cylinder OR Title:cylindrical

Parenthesis Grouping

When you start getting into more detailed searches, it may be necessary to group your search criteria using parenthesis so it is clear which operators apply to which terms.

Example: (rounded OR chamfered) NOT corner AND edge