How do you set a reference field to search anywhere?

[David Yearsley]

I have done this in the past,but can't remember the steps. I have a reference field that I want to do an anywhere search instead of leading search. It is something simple but I can't find the code.

Thanks

[Mwatkins · Accepted solution]

Auto-Complete for Reference Fields - ServiceNow Wiki

[David Yearsley]

This is a global setting. I know there is a setting to set a single reference field to a contains search.

[Mwatkins]

I've looked through all the underlying code and I do not see any other way to control autocomplete.

1. If glide.ui.ref_ac.startswith is set to true then you can only default things to STARTSWITH. The only way to get a contains search in a reference field is for the end user to manually use a wildcard character at the beginning of their search term. For the desktop UI the wildcard is the star character (*). For the mobile UI it is the dot character (.).

2. If the glide.ui.ref_ac_startswith property is set to false then nothing changes - well almost nothing. Everything still defaults to using STARTSWITH searches unless there is a user preference specifying that the table being referenced use CONTAINS. Out-of-the-box the only table that has a user preference set to use a CONTAINS search is the sys_user table. This means that all fields that reference the sys_user table in the whole platform will all use CONTAINS searches (e.g. incident.caller_id, incident.assigned_to, change_request.requested_by etc.)

Maybe an earlier version allowed the setting of CONTAINS search on a field by field basis functionality - I've been around since Spring2010 and I do not recall it being available - but it would be a nice enhancement request. At the moment I believe the most granular you can get is setting it by the table being referenced but not specifically by field.