Search your collection

Work one list page from a single word down to the few rows you wanted.

Five lists in Sepal carry the same search box: Accessions, Material, Locations, Taxa, and Contacts. The box searches text and filters fields at the same time. This page works one query from a bare word down to a narrow result, and its examples assume the Accessions list. Query syntax describes the whole grammar, including comparisons, negation, and matching several values at once.

Open a list page

Select Accessions, Material, Locations, Taxa, or Contacts in the sidebar. The search box sits at the left of the bar above the table, and its placeholder shows an example query for that page. On Accessions it reads Search... (e.g., taxon:Quercus provenance:wild).

At the right of the same bar, a count reads 25 of 1,284. The first number is the rows loaded so far and the second is the rows the query matched. Watch the second number as you type, because it is how you know whether a term did any work.

Search for a word

Type a word and stop. Sepal runs the search as you type, so there is no button to select, and the table and the count both update.

A bare word is a full-text search, and what it matches depends on the page:

List	A bare word matches
Accessions	The accession code
Material	The taxon name
Locations	The name, the code, and the description
Taxa	The taxon name
Contacts	The name, the business, and the email address

The last word you type is matched as a prefix, so Quer finds Quercus before you finish typing it. Every word before it has to match in full. Quotation marks around two or more words hold them together as a phrase, so "red oak" matches red oak where the unquoted red oak also matches oak red. A phrase that ends the query keeps the prefix on its own last word, which is why "Quercus alb" still finds Quercus alba.

Filter on a field

A bare word on the Accessions list reaches the code and nothing else, so searching for a name needs a field. Add field:value to what you have already typed.

taxon:Quercus

The fields differ by list. Which fields exist gives every field that each list takes, with the type that decides how it matches.

Searching the code reaches a year rather than one accession, because Sepal holds a code like 2022.0001 as the two words 2022 and 0001. Put = in front of the whole code to match it as it is stored.

code:=2022.0001

Sepal ignores a field it does not recognize rather than reporting it, so a misspelled field name widens the result instead of narrowing it. If a term appears to do nothing, check its spelling against that table.

Narrow the result

Add a second term. Sepal joins terms with AND, so a record has to match all of them, and each term you add can only make the result smaller.

taxon:Quercus location:GH material.status:alive

That query matches oaks with living material in GH. The glossary lists every value that material status and material type take. Keep adding terms until the count is small enough to read, then select a row to open its panel beside the table.

To widen one field without widening the rest, separate its values with commas. Commas mean OR inside a single field, and two different fields still narrow each other. A comma list also matches each value exactly, where a single value matches a substring, so location:GH,SH misses the GH2 that location:GH finds. How a text filter matches explains that.

taxon:Quercus location:GH,SH

When you cannot remember a field name or the values it takes, build the term instead of typing it.

Select Filter beside the search box. The Add Filter panel opens.
Choose a field from Select field…. The list holds the fields for the page you are on, by their labels rather than their query names.
Choose an operator. A text field offers Contains, Does not contain, Equals, and Does not equal. A date field offers Equals, After, On or after, Before, and On or before.
Enter a value. A field with a fixed set of values offers them in a Select value… list rather than a text box.
Select Add.

Sepal appends the term to whatever is already in the search box and reruns the search. The box keeps the text, so you can read what the dropdown wrote and edit it by hand from there.

Widen a search that matched nothing

An empty table under a query you typed reads Nothing matched, with the advice to try fewer terms or clear the filters. That is a query problem rather than an empty collection, and Sepal says so rather than offering to create a record.

Delete the last term you added and watch the count. A term that changes nothing was either redundant or misspelled, and a term that drops the count to zero is the one to reconsider.