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Hi John,
Eesh, unfortunately the existing search feature isn't terribly strong, so you're rather out of luck. Searching for blank fields can't be done, because the search tools requires you to enter a search string. All you could really do is create a View for each search that you'd like to do. That would allow you to limit the results in that View to only show results that had empty values for a particular field or fields. Not ideal, but it's at least a workaround.
And searching for exact phrases isn't exactly possible either. :-( The SQL SELECT statement that's generated for the searches wraps the string in "%" characters so that ANY results that have that entire string in it will be returned. You could again try getting around this with Views, but I'm not sure that would work... still, worth a shot.
Providing a better search tool is definitely a priority. Once I finish up work on the translations and I can start getting back to main Form Tools development I'll definitely keep this in mind.
Sorry I couldn't be more help!
- Ben
Posts: 2,456
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Ah sorry, I wasn't very clear.
My point was that Views let you add one more filters. You could create a View with a filter that returns all results where Field A == "" (empty). That would let you bypass the search tool and instead pick a View to "search" that subset of data. The View filter settings provide a little more control than the search.
Depending on your data set this may not be feasible (e.g. if you had to create 100 Views), but it's still an option.
- Ben
