New! Chat History Search Kung Fu

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Hold on to your hats, we have BIG news!  We're adding search to the Chat History page in both the admin dashboard and the webclient for staffing.  So when you need to locate that chat from two years ago from a patron that texted asking about an obscure poem from the 1950's, we've got you covered.

New "Search chats..." Input

Above the date explorer, we've added a search input where you can search through most chat metadata fields and transcript content (if you've elected to save chat transcripts).  For example and if you wished to search for chat transcripts that contain the word bibliography, you could enter the word bibliography in the search input.

Search phrases are enclosed in quotes: "enumerative bibliography".

Multiple search terms or phrases are separated by spaces and ORed together:

•  "enumerative bibliography" catalog

Use the operator_msg or guest_msg fields to restrict search to only operator messages or guest messages respectively.  So if you wanted to search for all chats with transcripts where an operator used the word bibliography:

• operator_msg:bibliography

You may be thinking to yourself, that's pretty fancy but how am I supposed to remember these field names three months from now?  Never fear.  That's where advanced search comes in!

Advanced Search

Using advanced search, you can get very specific without needing to remember all the nitty gritty details of keywords.  Advanced search replaces the old filter concept we used to have for metadata columns in the grid.

Chat metadata search keywords come with an extra bonus -- most support wildcards:

• Use * for partial matches. E.g. Use chat* to find any word that starts with chat.
• Use ? to replace any single-character. E.g. Use ch?t to match words like chat, chbt, ch4t, etc.
• Use ! to omit exact matches. E.g. Use !chat to omit results that contain word chat.
• Use * with ! to omit partial matches. E.g. Use !*chat to omit results with words that end in chat.

Expanded Date Exploration Options

You may have noticed a couple new things going on with dates in the sections above.  We've added an "all dates" option for searching all chats.   We've also added date range shortcuts which make grabbing common date ranges a snap:

• last 7 days (range:week)
• this month (range:month)
• this quarter (range:quarter)
• this year (range:year)

When you first use the new search feature, the default date range will be set to range:week.  From there and each time you use the Chat History & Activity page, it remembers the last search settings used.

This way, the ranges you set will always be relative to the actual current date.  So if you leave it set to range:day you'll always have the current day's chats when you first load the page.

Pagination

Last but not least, we've added pagination.  It makes for a much snappier user interface experience, especially when you have lots (138,520 in the screenshot below) of chats.

Downloading

chat history