Searching By Characteristic Values

For certain entities in the system that have characteristics, you may search for a record linked to a given characteristic value. The search may be done in one of the following ways:

Some base searches provide an option to search for an object by entering Characteristic Type and Characteristic Value.
Your implementation may define a customized search for an entity by a characteristic value for a specific characteristic type using a query data explorer.
Your implementation may require a business service to find a record via a given characteristic value. For example, maybe an upload of user information attempts to find the user via an Employee ID, defined as a characteristic.

Not all entities that support characteristics support searching by characteristics. Refer to the data dictionary to identify the characteristic collections that include the search characteristic column.

CAUTION:

For ad-hoc characteristics, only the first 50 bytes are searchable. For foreign key characteristics, the search value is populated by concatenating the values of each foreign key column to a maximum of 50 bytes .

For the base searches that provide a generic option to search by characteristic type and value, you can restrict the characteristic types that can be used to search for an entity. For example, imagine you use a characteristic to define a "jurisdiction" associated with a To Do for reporting purposes. If your company operates within a very small number of jurisdictions, you wouldn't want to allow searching for a To Do by jurisdiction, as a large number of To Do entries would be returned.

A flag on the characteristic type allows an administrator to indicate if searching by this characteristic type is allowed or not allowed.