"Contains"-Search in Service Portal

[David357]

Hi Folks,

we have the requirement to implement a "contains"-search in Service Portal. For example, if someone is searching for an Apple device, he should also get the results when only typing "pple":

In the forum, I already read that this could be achievable by modifying the Search Sources (Service Portal -> Search Sources), but unfortunately it didn`t work out for me.

I imagine, such a demand might be a common use case, so it`d be nice, if someone shares his code or other solution ideas.

Thanks in advance! 

[Matthew Smith]

Hi David

I'm not confident enough to recommend you go ahead and implement this, as I suspect this is not OOTB functionality for a reason (or possibly several) ..

However, I noticed you get the desired functionality by adding * to the beginning of your search and so you could look at updating the "Catalogs" Search Source Data fetch script to something like this:

var indexGroup = (typeof indexGroup !== "undefined") ? indexGroup : "portal_index_group";
(function(query, indexGroup) {
	
	query = '*' + query; //add contains operator to the users search term

	var results = [];

 - Matt

[David357]

Hi Matt,

thanks for your answer. It already helped to improve the results.
Unfortunately there`s still one flaw: this contains-method somehow doesn`t work, if one already knows the correct start of a word/meta tag.

So in terms of the example above, it works when typing "Apple" and even "pple", but it doesn`t work for "App" or "Appl".

Do you have an idea, why this might be?

[Matthew Smith]

Hi David

I did a bit more digging and I think this may work:

var indexGroup = (typeof indexGroup !== "undefined") ? indexGroup : "portal_index_group";
(function(query, indexGroup) {
	
	query = '*' + query + ' | ' + query;

It seems * is expecting a character to appear before the search term which is why App and Apple was not matching anything. 

- Matt

[David357]

Hi Matt,

thanks again for your reply.
The new code didn`t change much in terms of results, but your idea inspired me to experiment a bit more.

Right now, I`m using this:

var indexGroup = (typeof indexGroup !== "undefined") ? indexGroup : "portal_index_group";
(function(query, indexGroup) {
	
   //enable "contains"-query
   query = '*' + query + '*';
   var results = [];

Now it also finds terms expanding the query, at least in most cases. The "Apple"-example still doesn`t work, but strangely all of our actual services can be found.

It might not be a ServiceNow Best Practice, but it feels like this code plus some decent meta-tags lead to a pretty close "contains"-search.