Theo's Blog

Posted by Theo Heselmans on June 17th, 2007

You can't imagine the number of times I needed to do a full-text search for an empty field.
A couple of months ago I read the most amazing undocumented feature in the FT-search: is present.
The tip showed up on the website of Andre Guirard: many thanks.
It works at least as of version 6.

This means you can now search for an empty field !
e.g.
not [country] is present
returns all docs without country (empty or not existing).

or
[language] is present
return all docs with the field language entered.

Told you it was a present !

PS. As long as we're talking FT-search, you did now that you can search on creation and modification date too, didn't you ?
It's documented (but well hidden) in the default Notes help:
Note Use the fieldname _CreationDate to find documents by the date they were created. For example, "[_CreationDate]=1/05/2001" finds documents created on January 5, 2001. Use the fieldname _RevisionDate to find documents by the day they were last modified. For example, "[_RevisionDate]=1/05/2001" finds documents that were last modified on January 5, 2001. These fields are contained in a document's header, not the document itself, and are therefore not in the list of fieldnames found in the Document properties dialog box.