Universal and Simple Searches in Subforms

From the Inside Sesame Help Desk

When doing a universal search, shouldn't it search in my forms under all of the vehicles I have listed on my "vehicle inspection" subform? For example, I created five records that have a vehicle called "Jeep four wheel." I did a universal search for "four wheel" and nothing came up. I wanted to see and count all of the four wheels we had in the system.
Christina

A Universal or Simple search in Sesame only searches the main form that is open and only searches in text fields (not dates, numbers, Boolean, or the like). What you're looking for are the records in your subforms. You can do that as well. Open your subform in standalone mode (open it as a main form) and do your search there. It will find all the records that have "four wheel" in any of the fields in any of the records. Then, since you obviously read some of our stuff before and added a record ID field that links your subrecords to their parent records, you can get a list of main records that "own" these subrecords. You could even print out a quick report from the subrecords database in standalone mode to see this.

Now that we've covered this we do need to tell you something - don't get too carried away with Universal or Simple search. Since they search every field on your form, they're much slower than a regular search. If you know what field you want to search in, just put your criteria in that field and do a regular search.

Remember, if you want only the records in the subform that meet your search criteria, you must search it in standalone mode. Otherwise, you will retrieve all of the Main records that have at least one subrecord with the criteria you are looking for as well as any other subform records attached to those main records.