Workaround for Search Scope Advanced Filter empty search string problem

Posted on by Carol

R2 made a change to search scopes that I wasn’t particularly happy with – in fact as far as I’m concerned they broke search. The Advanced Filter was offered as a way to restore old functionality, however that introduced two new bugs – clicking search with nothing in the search box returned nothing (listed here as a known problem) and  clicking Advanced Search with nothing in the search box gives you a bunch of unusable filters you have to delete.

I’ve been watching out for a fix for these problems and haven’t seen one (except in an early R2 hotfix that got recalled, so doesn’t count). Finally I asked my customer to open a PSS call and we were given a workaround that actually does solve the first problem.

Instead of setting the Advanced Filter like this (as per the documentation):

/ManagementPolicyRule[contains(DisplayName, '%SEARCH_TERM_STRING%')]

you set it like this:

/ManagementPolicyRule[starts-with(DisplayName, '%%SEARCH_TERM_STRING%')]

Note there is a double % there. We are basically using the first % as a wildcard, giving us a “contains” functionality. An empty string is now effectively a wildcard, giving us all objects as we would expect.

 

I've been doing IT for 30 years, and IdM for 15. I live in Australia and build IdM solutions based on Microsoft Identity Manager. I also play the violin, but that doesn't help much with the IdM solutions.

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