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Using metadata to search for an item

The Search option is only available for advanced installations, and does not form part of the official release. Although this section only covers searching for Items, the procedure to search for other entities with metadata is very similar.

For more information on adding metadata to items (and other entities), see Classifying items with metadata.

The Advanced Search option is only available for TAO Ignite.

1. Select the criteria you wish to use in your Search for items.

In the search box on the right of the blue Action Bar, enter the value of any property for which you wish to retrieve the relevant items – for example, you may wish to retrieve all items containing multiple choice interactions. This can be any of the Metadata you entered in the Properties description: the Label field (if Items are named for easy retrieval), Language field, item Type, or any other Properties you defined for the items in the Class for which you are carrying out the search.

To make your search more specific, it is also possible to use the name of the Property as well as its value to guide the search. For example, you may wish to retrieve all items with a certain Label field. In this case the search criteria needs to take the form of the following example: Label:biology.

Advanced Search (TAO Ignite/Enterprise only)

  1. Select Search button (magnifying glass next to the Search bar in the top-right corner).

  2. Select which folder you want to confine your search to.

  3. Select Add Criteria, and pick a choice from the drop-down menu. Repeat to expand your filter criteria.

  4. For properties that are linked to lists (close-ended), select Exact match, In, or Not in:

    • Exact match: The search results will include all resources that have the property containing all of the selected values in the criteria. It will exclude resources that have additional values for that property not included in the filter criteria. For example, searching for values of “1”, “2” will find “1, 2, 3”, but will not find “1, 3, 4”.

    • In: The search results will include all resources containing any of the values defined for that criteria. It will not exclude resources that have additional values for that property not included in the filter criteria.

    • Not in: The search results will exclude all resources with matching property values to the filter criteria.

Selecting In provides users with greater flexibility when searching in properties that can hold multiple values from a list. Selecting Not in allows users to filter out resources that contain the filter criteria values and focus only on resources that do not have them.

2. Once you’ve selected the filter criteria for your search, click on the blue Search button.

This will bring up a list of Items which meet your filter criteria. In this window, you can select any Item you wish to open. This could be to preview, or to author, or simply to identify where the Item is located for use in building your Test.

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