Making Searching easier for LMS Administrators

[ChrisStiles]

In this blog, we'll review some of the opportunities you have to make your LMS administrators lives easier when searching for entities in Learning Administration.

Let's get started with some high level options that are easily configured, low risk, but have high rewards!

Log into SuccessFactors, and navigate to the LMS Administration home page.  From here, follow this click path:

System Administration » Configuration » System Configuration » SEARCH

This screen contains many configuration options, only some of which will apply to Admins, but those are the ones we will focus on in this blog.

First up, resultMaxRowsAllowed!

#This configuration limits the number of rows that can be downloaded from the Admin Search Framework results, and 

#number of results shown in the Admin Power Search.

resultMaxRowAllowed=2000

One of the great conveniences in LMS is that when you search for an entity (lets say, users, or items), there is a "Download Search Results" link that will download to CSV.  This is one of my personal favorite features, which, for small data sets is a nice substitute for reports.  Generally, there is extensive filtering capacity on most entity searches, (I'll cover enhancing these even more in a later blog) but when I need a short list in Excel to pass along, this is very nice.

On occasion, my final list exceeds 2000 records.  When I try to download my search results, despite having 3500 result (as a fictitious example), I will only get the first 2000 in my downloaded CSV file.  This setting will fix that.  If I set that property to 4000, I'd get all of my 3500 records in the CSV, as desired.

I'll pause here for a moment, and say that I seldom need to do this, and it would be best practice not to increase this too much.  If you are in need over 10k records+, then I would take a look at the standard LMS reports, and see what might be available there.  Downloading search results is not a replacement for LMS Reports, nor for Data Services.

Next up, adminRowsPerPage and adminShowAllOption.  When you search for an entity, you'll likely get more than what you were looking for.  Let's set aside the fact that you should probably apply more criteria to your search for a moment, and take a look at the results.  Nice that you have page, upon page, upon page of results, and that capacity to adjust the size of those pages.   Those options are driven by the following configurations.

#Available options to the Admin for rows per page.

adminRowsPerPageOptions[5]=true

adminRowsPerPageOptions[10]=true

adminRowsPerPageOptions[25]=true

adminRowsPerPageOptions[50]=true

adminRowsPerPageOptions[500]=true



adminShowAllOption=false

adminShowAllLabel=label.All

 

In principle (and best practice), 5, 10, 25, 50 and 500 on a page should be sufficient.  More than that (and arguably for 500) you are probably not adding enough criteria to your search to find what you were looking for. If there is a need to see them all at once, download your search results to CSV.  On that note, adminShowAllOption is by default set to false.  You could set this to true, and in many cases that would be fine.  Categories, Facilities, etc for example would be fine to have a "Show All" option.  Where it wouldn't be good to have, is on the item or user search, particularly if you have a lot of content or employees respectively.   This is a global setting, and will apply to all of your search screens.  Please use with extreme caution!

 

Note: You are not limited to those 5 values.  You can also add options, such as 100, and subsequently, set it as the default value.

#Default number of rows displayed per page. (default was 10, set this to a new value 100, as seen below)

resultRowsPerPage=100



[...]



#Available options to the Admin for rows per page.

adminRowsPerPageOptions[5]=true

adminRowsPerPageOptions[10]=true

adminRowsPerPageOptions[25]=true

adminRowsPerPageOptions[50]=true

adminRowsPerPageOptions[500]=true



#adding 100 as a new value

adminRowsPerPageOptions[100]=true

 

This next one is my all time favorite!  When I'm searching for an entity, I'm usually wanting to do a keyword search, but specifically on a field.  Meaning, I don't necessarily know that it "Starts with" what I'm looking for, but I do know that it "Contains" what I'm looking for.  The default operator in all searches across all of LMS administration is "Starts with".  This is driven by the following configuration:

#All the criteria in all the searches will default to the first matched value in this list

matchOptionDefaults[OP_STARTWITH]=true

matchOptionDefaults[OP_GREATER]=true

If you add the following line to the configuration, "Contains" becomes the new default for all searches, which will save your admins a couple clicks for every search they do! (that is, if they are anything like me)

matchOptionDefaults[OP_CONTAINS]=true

Lastly, set both of these to true.  Even if your admins aren't using wildcard searches, it doesn't hurt to enable it.

# This configuration allows the enabling of wildcard characters to be used in searches (_ for single and % for multiple). 

enableSingleCharacterWildCard=false

enableMultipleCharacterWildCard=false

As the comment in the configuration page suggests, use underscore for a single space and percent for multiple.

Note:  Be careful enabling the single wildcard option, as underscore is very common in entity IDs (such as Item IDs).

In summary, we've covered 4 easy search-related configuration changes that will make your administrators lives just a little easier!  (and who wouldn't love that?!)  Happy Searching!