I recently started a trial and was surprised to find the limitations on the Advanced Search logic. To pull a mailing list, I'd like to have a saved search: Any of multiple, but not all, Member Levels AND my custom field Newsletter Preference set to Mail or Email & Mail. We also have a lot of reporting that we have to do, and I'm sure I will run into other instances where this is needed.

Please make the advanced search of members better! Since saved searches are one of the only way to send out emails to people it would be great to have more attributes. Especially having to deal with events (by name, label, payment needed), invoices, and others.

No estimations, sorry.

more robust search criteria

YES! I just submitted a request for this. Your design solution is exactly what I want. When will it be available?

Query function should allow any / all match to be applied to each criterion.

Example: I am trying to create a list of members who want an email announcement of an event. Query matches any of the criteria Preferred contact method is email only
Preferred contact method is email and postal mail
But now I want to exclude certain members who have indicated they will not be able to attend. I want the first two criteria to be ANY. But I want Last name is not ______ to be an AND query. Otherwise, every member other than the named one will be included.

I would like to see this feature, as it relates to "OR=" logic. Would be helpful for our organization when trying to find several (but not all) of our memberships of certain levels.

If this design can't be scheduled for the near future, here is a small change that will meet the requirements of a number of the posters below. It will also make the full design easier to use.

Currently if a contact or membership field type is checkboxes, you permit searching on any, all or none of the choices. But if the field type is radio button, we can only search on one of the choices.

My suggestion is for search criteria to treat radio button fields the same as check boxes. So although the member has to choose one of the radio button alternatives, we could specify a single search criterion to select several alternatives.

The current design will allow the same thing, but the admin would have to enter a separate criterion for each desired choice.

This would be beneficial to have in advanced searches.

I needed this today with a search, luckily there was a very simple workaround exporting the list to excel then filtering out the results however it can get messy.

I needed to make a search for Members within an area to apply for funding.

Where

Postcode was a list of ANY postcodes in that district (10 or so)

AND

Membership Level is ACTIVE.

It's a good point, but it's not a simple thing for us to do - advanced search functionality is technically complicated, there a number of performance challenges to it. We will get to this topic in due time.

In my view, the most common clash of AND and OR is when you have OR logic criteria, but also want to exclude Lapsed members (or only include Active ones). Couldn't you just add a check box for all searches saying "Exclude lapsed: X". One small step for a programmer, one big step for admins!

I think this is where my request fits in on the user board, so here it goes!

It would be nice to be able to search fields that are blank.

Example: We have a regions field where members are assigned to one of seven regions. What I need to do on typically a quarterly basis is search for member where the REGION field is Null/Blank. Right now my only options for the Region field are: Is and Is Not. The only work around is to create a saved search where I add seven Region criteria and set them to Is Not and then the name of each region. This works, but it's another saved search where it should be easy enough to run a search where Region is Null.

For now I will keep my saved search, but it would be nice to eventually see a Null search on just about any criteria that is available.

Thanks

Yes, please. It is so frustrating the way it is. I would like to me able to search on fields which are blank, in case someone registering left something out. I have made my own codes and would like to search on greater than or less than for those. I used to use the much-maligned Microsoft Works but at least you could create complicated searches, just the way you wanted them.

Thank you.

I would like to be able to create a search using "and" or "Or"

Can we please have the ability to use Boolean operators when making queries against the WA database? It is not difficult. I don't want to program an Apollo (or Soyuz) space rocket. I just want to be able to say, "A and (B or C)". Specifically, I want to make a query that will return me all the records where "MembershipStatus is 'Active' AND (PostCode begins with '42' OR '43').

See [19B-1C0D4E8B-0479] How to combine ANDs and ORs in a Query.

Or even "search within results" would be helpful...

I'll add my vote for Boolean logic -

I also think you underestimate your users. Any database should have it. If you think people will be turned off put it separately from the regular advanced search, but it's sorely needed!

ruthi

While I appreciate the Boolean search capabilities is now available using the API and believe it will help resolve this problem in some cases, it is not a solutions for narrowing the list of members when attempting to e-mail using the system.

I also agree with other posters, do not underestimate the user base. I believe it is far more confusing to our clients to NOT have a more advanced Boolean search capabilities then having it would be. At least if it was within the system, the user could study examples and work to solve the problem. The way it is today, it looks like a poorly thought out solution because it lacks any way of sub-setting some searches. (examples provided in several other posts)

By the way, our API supports combination of AND and OR in filtering - see http://help.wildapricot.com/display/DOC/Contacts+API+V1+call#ContactsAPIcall-Logicaloperators

I would also very much like to have access to all fields when searching -- e.g., date joined, event attendance (we would like to know how many of our members have ever attended one of our events), date paid (so we can compare membership levels for a date in this year vs. a date in last year), etc.