The Search Bar

 

One of the most useful tools in Sales Layer is the search bar. As Sales Layer can handle around two million references, it’s crucial that you are able to filter easily, as well as having a labeling system that is both agile and simple.

Please keep in mind that the option will only become visible if you have a minimum of 15 products in your account.

There are two ways to run searches in Sales Layer. One consists in processing it directly with simple instructions, and another with an intuitive system, the advanced search, that guides you and molds the search the way you need. In both cases you have the option to save the searches and reuse them for future needs.

Filters on the search bar

There you can add as many new filters as needed:

Option to save the searches and reuse

You can choose the field, the type of search and even combine them.

Advanced searchAdvanced search

Thanks to filters you can refine your search and look for those specific products that you need to find. You can save up to 10 searches per user or delete them permanently.

In order to save your searches, once you have entered the term for the search you want to save, click on the star on the right and then on the save button. 

How to save a search

To view your saved searches, simply click on the search bar and you will see them listed below.

saved search on the search bar

If you want to delete them, click on them and on the right side, click next to the star, where you will see the option delete saved search.

delete saved search

 

Warning: the search bar returns only results included within the same table from which you are performing the search. In other words, you will not be able to use the search function to access data from another table. For example, if you are in the Variants table, you cannot search for data belonging to the Product table.

Note: if you use Safari as a browser, the advanced search in Sales Layer will not show the datepicker when filtering by date. You will have to search in the YYYY-MM-DD format. Moreover, it is not possible to filter per hour if you use Safari.

You can also do searches without the help of the advanced search by selecting directly from the search bar. 

If, for example, we search for "red", Sales Layer will search for “red” in every field of every product; this means we might get back some results we are not interested in. To improve on this, we can set it so that Sales Layer should only look for red in one specific field, for example the colour field.

field

To do this you start by typing Field: at which point Sales Layer will automatically display all the fields you have available to choose from, select the colour field, type another colon, add the word “red”, and press enter. Sales Layer will then display any products that have the word red in their colour field. Be aware that this will also return products whose colour value contains the word “red”. If you would like to return just those products whose colour field is exactly “red”, then instead of a colon, you can use an equals sign (=).

As well as using Field: the search bar also supports a number of other options. By clicking on the small arrow on the right hand side, you can reveal a dropdown box that offers tips, as well as displaying a number of shortcuts for some default searches such as products with/without variants, or those which do/don’t belong to categories. 

It’s also possible to search using multiple criteria at once, by separating them with spaces:

field:color:red field:name:shirt

You can fine tune your searches further by choosing to include or exclude certain criteria using the + and - signs.

Advanced searching
Advanced searching

For example, in the above search we are choosing to show those products which have red and blue in their colour field, but do not contain the word “contrasting” in their name field.

You can also search inside multilingual fields. To do this, you can indicate the language suffix (based on ISO 639-1 code table) at the end of the field name in brackets, as shown in the example below: 

field:"product title(en)":"big car"

If you wish, you can refine your search also using the search inside parenthesis. For example:

Example: (field:color=red -field:color=blue) +field:size=M

Sales Layer gives you the option of listing the items with any value or an empty field using the sign “”, for example:

field:"description(en)"=""

Or the opposite:

field:"description(en)"<>""

Or excluding::

field:"title":car -field:"description"=""

 

Other special searches

Listed below are other examples of special searches that you can perform thanks to the Sales Layer search bar:

  • select:empty fields: Shows items with empty fields.
  • select:incomplete items: Shows items with incomplete field values.
  • select:without images or select:with images: Filters items without / with primary images.
  • select:pending translations: Shows items with pending translation.
  • select: quality <40 / select: quality> 40: Shows items based on the percentage of completeness (quality score).

(Only for the Category table)

  • select:without products or select:with products: Shows categories without / with products

(Only for the Product table)

  • select:without categories or select:with categories: Shows products without / with categories
  • select:without variants or select:with variants: Shows products without / with variants

(Only for the Variant table)

  • select:without products or select:with products: Shows variants without / with product association
  • select:recent Shows only the recently created or modified items. In the section Images or Files, it shows the last modified images or files.

Warning: If you want to search in a date type field, you must write the values following this example: field:"START DATE":"2022-02-02 00:00".

You can also search based on when a product was last modified:

select: modified yesterday
select: modified Tuesday
select: modified 2018-08-12
select: modified> -"5 months"
select: modified>"30 december 2017"
select:modified<”1 day"
select:modified="october 2018"
select:modified>"-60 days"
select:modified>"-60 days" +select:modified<"-30 days"

or last created:

select:created>"-1 day"
select:created="october 2018"
select:created>"-60 days"

Warning: If you modify the reference of an item, the system will consider it as new. As a result, its creation date will be the same as the modification date of its reference.

Finally, you can also find the search bar in other places in Sales Layer: such as in categories, variants, workflows, and channels, where it can be used to create a channel that only exports content based on specific search criteria.

Advanced searching when creating a connector
Advanced searching when creating a catalog
Advanced searching when creating a connector
Advanced searching when creating a team

Warning: if you are performing a search using more than one filter, keep in mind that the fields must belong to the same family. Otherwise, searching for fields in different families, the system will return those that are in the first family that you indicated.

Note: the simple search can only check the first 10 fields which are recorded in the database due to response time reasons. Bear in mind that, if the field was not created in All families, the system will not take it into account.

Warning: the simple search using 2 or less characters will only take in consideration the first characters in the field. For example, if we write "XI" in the search bar, and we have two products called "Jacket XI" and "XI Shirt", the results would only show the second product, having the characters "XI" at the beginning of the name. This mechanism does not affect searches of 3 or more characters.