There appears to be no way to do even the simplest of Boolean searches in the Advanced search interface.

For example find all active members that are faculty, staff, or students of a university:

(Primary email ends with .edu OR Secondary email ends with .edu) AND Member status is Active

I would agree that Boolean logic is something that should be standard for every database search. Yesterday, I had to send out multiple copies of the same email to target 70 middle school teachers in different regions of the state. It would have been much easier to conduct one search targeting middle school teachers AND in region 1 OR in region 2 OR in region 3, etc. to find all 70.

Don't underestimate the abilities of your users. Boolean searches have been around for a long time and are not that difficult to use.

Wholeheartedly agree that the current logic for the search function is woefully limited and inadequate. It's probably the single biggest frustration. The and/or/null issues raised above are all fairly basis in most systems. Without this functionality, we have to jump through hoops to get the segmented list we want. Alternatively we're stuck having to create additional fields that we populate and then search on. Please make this a higher priority. Thanks.

If you could at least start with the AND function, it would really be helpfful. We do a lot of direct targeting emails: we have our meetings in a different state each year, some parts of the meeting have an attraction to a subset of our members,.Instead of doing 3 separate member level searches in 4 separate states and combining all 12 searches, it would be a lot easier to just be able to search on level 1 AND 2 AND 3 and leave 4, 5 and 6 blank, PLUS to search on one state AND surrounding states at the same time: such as CA and AZ and WA and NV, rather than a different search for each of these states.

Having AND, OR and NOT (BUT) operations for each particular search criteria is still not something we going to have soon, unfortunately - we are focusing now on other areas (Content management improvements). We will look into this later - this is not an easy change both in terms of development time and designing it in easy to use and understand way (see earlier Dmitri comment on that).

But we probably can update some of our search criteria (like membership levels and status) and allow to choose several options instead of only one (like "any of selected" levels instead of "is" a single level).

Yes! This is a big one for me, too. I am constantly having to run two or three searches and then add totals together or combine spreadsheets as a workaround. A common query for me would be:

Renewal due this month

AND

Membership level = Premier Business OR Membership level = Premier Medical

Or perhaps:

Role = consultant

AND

Renewal due on or after January 1, 2011 OR Registered for specific events

This, of course, isn't as advanced as it could go if we could also use BUTS. I'd be happy with the AND/OR options.

Thanks!

John,

Thanks for posting.

The reason we are reluctant to add Boolean search is because for non-technical people (majority of our users) it might make things confusing and unnecessarily complicated. I would appreciate examples of searches you need to run but currently can't in WA so that we can look at possible solutions.

About access to all fields - please email us at support @wildapricot.com with details

About exporting subset of fields - understood, there is a separate thread on that.

This is a normal function for every single database I have used until WA. It does not seem to me that this should be an 'optional' feature. Lack of this functionality severely cripples searches. Additionally users need to be able to:
* have access to all of the fields when searching, not just a subset for each module
* choose which fields they want to export from a list of all fields in the database

WA's search features are woefully limited. Users need to be able to:
* conduct multiple contiguous searches (e.g., a and b but not c OR d and e but not f, etc.)
* have access to all of the fields when searching, not just a subset for each module
* choose which fields they want to export from a list of all fields in the database

Yes, this would be enormously helpful. For instance, when I'm sending out emails to members who might be close to a convention in Oregon, I want to alert people in CA, ID, OR and WA. At the moment I either have to send four emails or select "is not" for all the other states.

It is something on my wishlist.

Teri

OFLA

Paul, as you can see, this thread did not have any comments before yours so for now we are not really planning it in our roadmap - seems to be less important to our users than dozens of other things. So we will wait to hear more input here.

Any chance of this happening? AND, OR & NOT between each search criterion? It seems like a strange lack for an advanced search system.

Thanks,
Paul