Question regarding <referenced table>.autocomplete.contains user preferences

[SusanWinKY]

We'e got a question about how to default some searches in the Service Portal to use 'contains' rather than 'starts with'.  I've reviewed the documentation and understand now that we can handle this with a system property update and some user preferences.

My question is, if we update the glide.ui.ref_ac.startswith system property to 'false' and add user preferences for some tables, how will the search behave for tables that do not have a user preference?  Will those continue to use the 'starts with' search by default?

Example:  If we add a user preference for sys_user.autocomplete.contains but do not add one for sys_user_group.autocomplete.contains, will a search for a group use 'starts with'?

[shill · Accepted solution]

We have our property set to false and it still does a starts with search on references that do not have a specific preference set, so I think your example is how it works.

It seems the logic is the property set to true overrides every preference system wide, but when false, it allows a contains search for those reference items specified in the user preference with the starts with as the default if non found.

At least that seems to be my experience.