Filtering Channels displayed in the Dashboard

Simple Search Criteria

You can use search/filter criteria to specify which channels are displayed in the Dashboard Server List.

If you have defined a large number of channels, and you are having trouble locating a specific channel (or channels) in the Dashboard, you can search for a channel name, a channel description or a channel group name.

To search the Dashboard, type all or part of a channel name, a channel description or a channel group name in the Search field. This field is located in the upper right corner of the Dashboard, and is labelled with the icon:

As you type, the Dashboard is updated to only display the channels whose name or description contains what you have typed in the Search field, or which are in a channel group whose name matches what you have typed in the Search field. A count of the number of channels being shown is displayed at the top of the Dashboard:

To view a description or channel group that is being matched, hover over the name of the channel to display its tooltip:

To cancel a search, click .

In the Search field, you can specify multiple words to be matched, exclude words, or use regular expressions. For more information, see Advanced Search Criteria.

You can also search for channels by typing the search criterion as part of a URL. For more details, see Search Criterion as a URL.

Advanced Search Criteria [top]

Use the Dashboard search field to filter the channels you wish to view. You can search by name or description and filter for channels in a channel group.

There are many different ways that you can specify the search text to be matched:

  • If exactly one word is specified in the Search field, an item is matched if it contains that word.
  • If more than one word is specified in the Search field, an item is matched only if all words specified are included in the name. For example,
Facilty1 Facility2

matches all items containing both Facility1 and Facility2.

  • To match either of two words, include OR between them:
Facilty1 OR Facility2

This matches all items containing Facility1 or Facility2. OR must be capitalized.

  • To exclude items from a search, put NOT in front of the word that you do not want to include in the search:
NOT Facilty1

This matches every item that does not contain Facility1. NOT must be capitalized.

  • To match a word and either of two other words, use the following:
Ward Facility OR Hospital

This matches every item that contains Ward and Facility, or contains Ward and Hospital.

  • To create more complicated searches, use parentheses:
Ward NOT ( Facility OR Hospital)

This matches all items that contain Ward except those that contain Ward or Hospital.

  • Another way to exclude items from a search is to put a – character in front of the word that you do not want to include in the search:
Facility – Ward

This matches all items that contain Facility and do not contain Ward.

  • To match a phrase that contains spaces, enclose the phrase in quotes:
“Foxton Hospital”
  • To include a quote character in a match criterion, precede it with a backslash:
“This search \” contains a quote”
  • To include a backslash in a match criterion, specify two backslashes:
“This search \\ contains a backslash”
  • To match a regular expression, enclose it in slash characters /:
/do+g/

This matches d followed by one or more of o followed by g. For example, dog, doog, and dooog are matched.

For a list of all the special characters that can be used in a regular expression, see Using Regular Expression Metacharacters.

Regex Search Criteria [top]

You can use also use regular expressions (regex) in the Dashboard search field, simply enclose the expression in slash characters /<regex>/.
Note: The closing slash is optional unless you wish to combine multiple regex expressions.

Tip: I found the Regex 101 and Regexr online testers very helpful when creating/testing the expressions on this page. The Regex Buddy application (Windows only) also comes highly recommended, though it is not free. And you can google to find many other regex testers.

Also the regexper page is helpful for visualising regex queries as Railroad Diagrams (EBNF Syntax Diagrams), for example the regex “/PID(\|[^|]*){5}(Sm[iy]the?)\b/” looks like this:

Here are a few simple, and useful, things that you can do with regex queries:

  • Use an anchor “^” to match all channels beginning with “CDA”:
    /^cda/

    Alternatively you can omit the second slash:

    /^cda
  • To match all channels beginning with “CDA” or “DB”, by combining two regexs:
    /^cda/ OR /^db/
  • To match all channels beginning with “CDA” or “DB”, with a single regex:
    /^cda|^db/

    Alternatively:

    /^(cda|db)/
  • To exclude all channels beginning with “CDA” or “DB”:
    NOT /^(cda|db)/

    Alternatively with regex, using “look-ahead not equals”:

    /^(?!.*(cda|db))/

Search Criterion as a URL [top]

You can search for channels by typing the search criterion as part of a URL. The format for this URL is:

http://hostname:port/dashboard.html?search=criterion

In the above, replace hostname with the host name or IP address of your Iguana server, replace port with the port on which the server is running, and replace criterion with the channel name, channel description or channel group name that you want to search for.

For example, if your Iguana server is running on port 6543 on localhost, and you want to search for all channels whose name or description contains the string LLP or that belong to a channel group whose name contains this string, type the following URL into the address field of your browser:

http://localhost:6543/dashboard.html?search=LLP

This behaves exactly as if you had typed LLP into the Search field.

Note: This search feature makes it is easy to use Iguana with a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) tracking system.

If you have defined a unique CRM number for each customer you deal with, and you include the customer’s CRM number in the Description field for each channel, searching for a CRM number will list all channels associated with a particular customer.

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