Basic Administration > Managing User Participation > Participant Administration > Understanding Participants (Users, Groups, and Organizations) > Working with LDAP Directory Services > Searching for Participants in Administrative Clients
  
Searching for Participants in Administrative Clients
The following administrative clients use a common interface when searching for participants (users, groups, and organizations):
Policy Administration -- When working with policy rules, you select participants against which the rules are applied.
Life Cycle Template Administration -- When defining an advanced life cycle template, you can select participants as constituents for any of the roles defined for that life cycle template.
Team Administration -- When defining team in a team template, you can select participants as constituents for roles.
Workflow Template Administration -- When defining activities, you can select participants to complete each assigned activity.
In these administrative clients, the ability to locate users, groups, and organizations is determined by the administrator’s access permissions and by the search scope used within each of the services searched. The administrator who is performing the search must have Read permission for participants to appear in the search result.
The service’s default search scope is used to locate users and organizations (that is, the search scope configured in the service’s JNDI adapter).
In the administrative clients, user-defined groups can be displayed. The search scope of the selected directory service determines which groups are displayed. For more information, see Working with LDAP Directory Services.
The methods used to display users, groups, or organizations within a participant search window are determined by setting participant search properties. Properties narrow the search and return participants with specific characteristics in the search results. By setting the following property values in the wt.properties file, you can change the behavior of the interface so that when the participants search window appears, it is automatically populated with all groups or organizations that are available.
For information about add, remove, and modify the properties in the Windchill property files, see About the xconfmanager Utility.
Search properties include:
Property Name
Properties.html
Search Property Function
Description
Max Count
com.ptc.netmarkets.userSearch.maxCount 
Defines the maximum results count
Controls how many results are returned from the search. The default is set to 50, limiting results to 50 returned participants.
* 
If you have a large number of groups or organizations, then automatically populating the participants window with them may take a long period of time. PTC recommends that you use the default setting for the Max Count property unless you have a small number of groups and organizations.
LDAP Query Limit
wt.org.LdapQueryLimit
Defines the maximum result size that can be requested by Windchill using an LDAP query.
Controls how many results LDAP sends to Windchill. If the property is set to zero, the internally configured LDAP value is used (typically 20000). If set to a lower value than the LDAP value, the value of this property is used. If set to a higher value than LDAP, then the LDAP configured value is used. The actual results returned to the user could be impacted by the com.ptc.netmarkets.userSearch.maxCount property.
* 
If your organization needs to limit communication with LDAP or if you will need to search on wide criteria that could return many results, PTC recommends that you use a value other than the default of zero (0).
Required Character Search
com.ptc.netmarkets.participantPicker.requiredCharacterSearch
Defines the minimum required characters
Specifies the quantity of characters required before a search will begin. For example, by setting the property to ‘3’, the search requires three characters in at least one field. The characters limit the search results to return participants named with the specified characters. The default is set to ‘0’; allowing any quantity of characters to be used in a search.
Invalid Characters
com.ptc.netmarkets.participantPicker.invalidCharacters
Defines invalid characters
Specifies which characters are not counted towards the Required Character Search property. Special characters, such as asterisk (*), colon (:), and comma (,) are good candidates to be specified as invalid characters.
For example, with Required Character Search set at a minimum quantity of 3, and defining (*) as an Invalid Character, the search string (ma*) would not be allowed because the asterisk is not counted as a character. However, the search string (mat*) would allow a search to run because the search string has at least 3 valid characters.
The default setting defines the space character (_) as invalid for use in a search.
* 
The Required Character Search property must be set to 1 or higher in order to use Invalid Characters property settings.
Leading Wildcard Allowed
com.ptc.netmarkets.participantPicker.leadingWildcardAllowed
Allows or prohibits leading wildcards
Controls whether a leading wildcard character (*) is allowed in a search field. The default is set to true; a leading wildcard character is allowed as a search parameter.
Setting this property to false may help increase search performance.
Principal Wildcard Search
com.ptc.netmarkets.user.principalWildcardSearch
Enhances search to find search content within participant names
Adds wildcards on either side of the specified search characters to return any result that contains those characters anywhere in the participant name. The default is set to true; wildcards are automatically added to search characters.
Setting this property to false may help increase search performance.