# Field Search

By default, searches match the text contained in all Index fields. These fields generally contain document content, such as the body of an e-mail or the main text of a word document.

You can use field search to:

- Find your search terms in a particular field. See Simple Field Restricted Search.

- Filter your results by the contents of a field. See Filter Results by a Field.

## Simple Field Restricted Search

Documents can have more than one index field, for example a title and the document body. You might also set up your documents such that one type of document has one index field, and another type of document has a different index field.

Simple field-restricted search finds documents where your search term matches in only the specified index field (or fields).

If your index fields are the document body and title, you might want to find documents where your search term occurs in the title, because those results are more relevant than documents where the search term occurs late in the content.

## Filter Results by a Field

Sometimes, you might want to refine a search by a detail that does not occur in index fields, such as the date that the document was created. You can use field search to restrict a query in this way, by using the FieldText query parameter.

You can optimize this type of field search by using field properties for the type of data. For example, if the field contains a date, you should use the `NumericDateType` property to optimize searches.

In general, you use this type of field search in addition to basic search, to restrict your result set. When IDOL Server processes the query, it matches the normal search terms first, and then restricts by fields. Micro Focus recommends using this method in combination with normal text search, which is often faster than using field search to find all documents that have a particular value in a field.

You can use field search in combination with Parametric Search . Parametric search allows you to find all the possible values of a field, so that you can restrict to one or more of those values.

Related Topics

- Fields Optimized for Search

- Parametric Search and Field Search

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