By default, searches are personal objects and only visible to their creator. Sharing a search allows you to collaborate with other users on the search and see changes in real time.
Table of Contents
- Sharing a Search and Managing Permissions
- Receiving Shared Searches
- Managing Search Versions
- Collaborating on a Shared Search
- Templating searches
Sharing a Search and Managing Permissions
Similar to other collaborative objects, like binders, you can share searches with individual users or groups, granting varying levels of access:
- View: Recipients can view the search but cannot make edits. They can create a personal copy of the search if they would like to make changes. However, their changes will not update the search for other users.
- Edit: Recipients can edit the search and its versions, including renaming. All edits are shared with collaborators on the search.
- Full Access: Recipients can view, edit, rename, share, and delete the shared search.
You can share searches directly from the results table. When you do this, the current results table view becomes the default for collaborators. Recipients of the search can customize their results table view afterwards, and their changes will be personal to them.
You can also share searches from the homepage. To do this, select the three-dot menu on the search card, and select "Share." Then, select the recipient, optionally edit the subject or to the body of the message, and adjust permissions as necessary. When sharing from the homepage, the results table view won’t be included.
If a search contains shareable objects, like Assignments, Search Term Reports (STRs), or Storybuilder objects, recipients with at least Receive permissions will be granted View access to those objects to allow them to see the search results. To see which objects will be shared and with whom, click “Show details”.
All search parameters (e.g. name, applied filters, grouping, etc), except sort, are shared along with the search.
Receiving Shared Searches
If someone has shared a search with you, you will receive a message in the Message Center with the search card attached. Click on the search card to open up the search and begin collaborating.
If the search was shared from the results table, it will open in the results table view from which it was shared. Any changes you make to your view will be personal to you. To, at any time, reset it to its original state, select “View” > “Reset to search default view” from the toolbar.
Like other collaborative objects, shared searches appear on your homepage with a user badge indicating the search's owner.
Managing Search Versions
Users with Edit or Full Access permissions on a search can make changes to the search that are applied for all users sharing the search.
All edits to a search are saved and logged in the search’s version history. A search’s version history is accessible from the dropdown menu next to the timestamp in the results table.
Each entry in the version history includes the timestamp of the edit, the type of edit, and the name of who made the edit. When you select a version, a snapshot of this search will be shown, including applied filters and grouping. Timestamps are displayed in your local time zone. You can filter versions by name, timestamp, or search parameters.
From the version history, users with Edit and Full Access permissions can also rename versions of the search or restore specific versions of the search. All search collaborators can make a copy of any version. Edits to these copies will not be reflected in the shared search search.
Collaborating on a Shared Search
On shared searches, users on the results table receive toast notifications whenever the search is updated.
To apply the latest changes, select the “Refresh” button in the toolbar. When there are updates to the search, or documents have been added or removed from the result set, a green star will appear under the Refresh icon.
If edits to the search occur when you are not viewing the results table, changes to the search will update automatically. A yellow dot will appear alongside the search timestamp when you next open the search. You can open the version history to view the specific changes made to the search.
Templating searches
If you have a set of core searches relevant to multiple projects, you can copy them into new projects from the beginning using project templating, even before documents have been uploaded into the new database.
To prepare a search for use in templating, a search should be added to a homepage folder and the folder should be shared with Edit or Full Access permissions to a user group that will copy to the new project. From there, a user with project and database administrator permissions on the existing project or an Organization Administrator can copy these objects over to the new project.