What is a Search Field?
Enable self-service and aquire end-to-end tracking for your business. Search Fields are key to find what they are looking for and thereby get their own answers. To find the data you are looking for; You do not need to know, design and code in advance!
A Search Field is used in Log Views to facilitate search conditions and can also be used for applying restrictions. Another powerful feature is the ability for end-users to perform Group By operations in the Log Views. An example can be; 'List all business transactions grouped by Order Number' (for example get order and order response, invoice and payment presented together).
- The actual values come from [Log Events][Log Events] (payload and/or context properties and/or fields). The Search Fields have one or more Search Field Expressions that extract the values for matching Message Types.
- There can be any number of Search Field Expressions set for a given Search Fields.
- There can be more than one value extracted from a Search Field Expression. This may be helpful when dealing with batches and messages with more than one entity (like multiple orders).
- The Search Field Expressions are .NET plugins and are either part of Nodinite Core Services, and/or you can write/provide your own.
The Web Client provides a test bench for working with Search Field Expressions and related logged data. The actual tests are performed in real-time in the background by the Logging Service. This feature ensures that your tests will work with real data during processing and re-processing (re-index).
Any logged message may be reprocessed (re-indexed) and additional Search Fields on existing data can be added to Nodinite. From a support and maintenance perspective, this means that you can find messages based on added criteria at a very late stage. To find the data you are looking for; You do not need to know, design and code in advance!
If old data already exists and you want to be able to search according to the new settings for the Search Fields, a re-index user-initiated operation must be executed. The re-index operation is based on Message Type.
There are no prerequisites on the logged data and the values can originate from:
- Message Body (payload)
- Context Properties (metadata/key-value pairs)
The Logging Service will process all messages based on Message Type. Nodinite supports the following formats for messages out of the box:
- XML
- Flat File
- EDI
- ...
Custom plugins
If required, you can write your own Search Field Expressions Type Plugins (applies to Nodinite <= 6.1)
Below is a list of different potential use cases:
- A lookup table in some data source (SQL, file-based sources, ...)
- Encrypted messages (keep the messages encrypted but do provide values to be used in Search Fields)
- Compressed files (Zip, Rar, ...)
- Special cases, for example: 'Get last 2 characters on line 3 in reverse and with uppercase'
- ...
Next Step
Add or manage Search Field
Add or manage Message Types
Add or manage Log View
Related
Search Field Expressions
Repository Model
Logging Service
Message Type Overview
Search Fields Overview