Using Wildcards In Action Network Reports & Queries

Using Wildcards In Action Network Reports & Queries

What Are Wildcards?

Wildcards are the blank Scrabble tiles of Action Network Queries. They can be used to replace a character or string of characters.

How Can They Be Used?


When the % symbol is placed after a string of characters it tells the system to capture anything starting with the string. So if you were to create a filter that targeted a field value of Ov% it would return records with field values beginning with Ov. For example: Oven, Over, Oval.

When the % symbol is placed both before and after a string of characters it tells the system to capture anything that contains the letters, but does not begin or end with them. So if you were to create a filter that targeted a field value of %ov% it would return records with field values containing ov. For example: Love, Rover, Dovetail.

When the % symbol is placed before a string of characters it tells the system to capture anything ending with the string. So if you were to create a filter that targeted a field value of %ov it would return records with field values ending with ov. For example: Chekov, Improv, Rachmaninov.

When the % symbol is entered with no string of characters it will return any value for the field that is being queried. For example, if we created a query that filtered on a Field with the name Favourite_Biscuit it would return all activists for whom we held a favourite_biscuit value- Jammie Dodgers, Rich Tea or Bourbons. It would not return a value for any activists for whom we did not hold a value in the favourite_biscuit field.

What Are The Practical Applications Of Wildcard Searches?

The practical application of using wildcards in your Queries and Reports are numerous but here are a few examples.

Using A Wildcard To Identity All Activists With A Mobile Number

Filtering on a % alone for a Field Value will return all activists with any value in that Field. So if you wanted to identify all activists for whom we hold a Mobile Number we could filter to include Field Values of % for the Mobile Number Field.



Using A Wildcard To Identify Student Members

Over time the names of particular Membership Types have changed which means the keyword you'd use to search could appear at the beginning, middle or end of the text string held in the Membership_Type Field. If we were to search for anyone with a Student membership we know that the word Student should appear in the field. We could create three separate filters as "or" arguments searching for %student, student% and %student%- but it's simpler to combine these into one filter which will capture all. In this case we'd drop the first and last letters of the word student to capture all activists with the letters "tuden" in their Membership_Type by filtering on a Membership_Type Field Value of %tuden%.



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