Finding Documents and Other Objects

The most efficient way of finding your documents and other objects is to use the M-Files search functions. This is especially useful when you remember only a single detail about the document or object, such as the creation date or the user who created the document.

Quick search

With the quick search function (at the top of the M-Files user interface), you can search for certain words associated with the object.

Advanced search

The advanced search allows you to define more search criteria related to the status and properties of the object. For example, if you want to view the documents that a certain user has checked out during the last month, this is easier to do by performing an advanced search than by creating a new view.

Tip: The more search criteria you use in the advanced search, the more likely you are to find the exact document or object you want.

Display the most relevant result first

The following information is of primary importance for providing search results:

When was this document or other object created?
When and how many times was the document or other object edited?
When and how many times was it processed?

By using this information, the you will find relevant data on the organization's newest and most commonly used documents or other objects. If several years have passed since the creation of the document and the document has not been updated for a long time, the document is perhaps not considered very relevant for the user and it is not included among the first search results.

In addition to the information related to document handling mentioned above, the occurrence of the search string in metadata and/or file contents influences the order of the search results.

An item's location among the search results is influenced by the search string appearing in the following:

The name or title of the document or other object
Other metadata than the name or title of the document or other object
File contents

The name is of special importance because the document or object name often contains essential information about the content. Additionally, M-Files ignores certain metadata that tend to decrease the relevance of the search results. Full-text search in files is influenced by, for example, the length of the file in such a way that the shorter document is given more importance than the long one when the two have the same number of matches for the search string. In any case, the order of the search results is always more dependent on metadata than file content.

Note: The set of search results is naturally influenced by the search criteria, which may include search of the metadata, full-text search, or both.

Search result definitions can be modified via the Windows registry settings.

For more information, see Search Functions.