The * character is required in report selection with OM Web Viewer 12.1

Products

• Output Management Web Viewer

Issue/Introduction

It seems an * is required at the end of every selection criteria in order to get expected results. This is confusing for some users.

If I want to see all TEXT#X999 reports - I would expect that if I enter "TEXT#X999" in criteria -- this would give me expected results --- but it seems I have to enter  "TEXT*X999*" 

Please explain exactly how the report selection criteria fields work.

 

Environment

• Output Management Web Viewer 12.1
• View®

Resolution

OM Web Viewer/View® supports the 3 search standards of text* *tex* or *xt, but not t*t.

Additional Information

When getting into the middle characters, there are many search engines that use ? (question marks) or *, and at one time, the type of "Mainframe C" programming language used in OM Web Viewer/View®, did support the question marks.  However, when they were converted to IBM C, the search times against the View database were very slow for leading asterisks, because in order to return the results every report had to be compared.

That is why for leading asterisks from OM Web Viewer, the opportunity to choose, by Repository, whether to disallow the leading asterisk or give a warning that the results may be slow in coming, along with not allowing leading asterisks at all, is provided.

Unfortunately with the IBM C functions, the placement of a wildcard in the middle of a Report ID, will cause View® to have to read through all of the results many times over in order to return the reports list - that is why it is not supported.  When there is a very large number of Reports involved, the time to get the response is unacceptable.