Search your collection

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

Seven lists in Sepal carry the same search box: Accessions, Material, Locations, Taxa, Contacts, Propagation, and Observations. The box takes words and field filters together. 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.

Every role can search every list. Readers do not see the Create or New button at the top of a list, because creating a record needs the editor or admin role.

Open a list page

Select one of those lists 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. The second number tells you whether the last term you typed changed the result.

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 searches the fields that each list is known by:

List	A bare word matches
Accessions	The accession code and the taxon name
Material	The material code, the accession code, and the taxon name
Locations	The name, the code, and the description
Taxa	The scientific name and the common names
Contacts	The name, the business, and the email address
Propagation	The parent accession code and the parent’s taxon name
Observations	The accession code or full material code, or the location code or name

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, and 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 searches several fields at once. To search one field only, 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 finds a whole year, not one accession, because Sepal indexes a code like 2022.0001 as the two words 2022 and 0001. Put = in front of the whole code to match it exactly.

code:=2022.0001

Sepal ignores a field it does not recognize and does not report 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 and not their query names.
Choose an operator. The operators depend on the field:
- 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.
- A count field offers Equals, Does not equal, Greater than, At least, Less than, and At most.
- A field with a fixed set of values offers Equals and Does not equal.
Enter a value. A field with a fixed set of values offers them in a Select value… list instead of 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. The dropdown does not offer ID fields or yes-or-no fields such as archived. Type those into the box.

Widen a search that matched nothing

When a query matches no records, the table reads Nothing matched, with the advice to try fewer terms or clear the filters. The message means the query excluded every record. It does not mean the list is empty.

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