Little Green Light software release preview for April 2012: Combine multiple queries and save your searches

Simple by default, powerful when you need it to be

The new advanced search form looks a lot like the old advanced search form. The default behavior is unchanged, so if you just need to run a simple name search, you don’t need to jump through any hoops to get there. But, when you need to pull that perfect list of constituents, you will have many more options at your disposal, with a lot more power and flexibility.

Additionally, advanced searching is now available in more places; you can build the same kinds of advanced searches (and save them) for Constituents, Gifts & Pledges, Goals, Contact Reports, Tasks, Notes, and Volunteering info.

Here is a quick overview of the key advanced searching features and updates.

Saved searches

This is a big time saver, as you can save any search that you want to use more than once. Saved searches are just a click away:

Searches can be saved so that they are visible only to you, or Shared with different user groups/roles so they are Global.

Combine multiple queries in a single search

You’ve always been able to combine multiple criteria in a single search in LGL. But now you can combine not just multiple criteria in one search, you can also combine multiple searches, each with its own set of criteria.

Let’s say we want to find everyone in our database who gave more than $50 total by this time last year, but has not given at least $50 this year. This can be done quite easily by combining the results of two queries:

You can combine queries in the following ways:

• and all: results must match all of the criteria defined in the first query AND the second query
• and any: results must match all of the criteria defined in the first query AND at least one of the criteria defined in the second query
• or all: results must match all of the criteria defined in the first query OR the second query
• or any: results must match all of the criteria defined in the first query OR at least one of the criteria defined in the second query
• and none: results must match all of the criteria defined in the first query AND NOT match all of the criteria defined by the second query

Note: you can combine more than two queries together in one search. When combining more than two queries, order of operations becomes a bit more important. This is where adding nested queries can be useful, so that you could build a search like this one: (Query 1 OR Query 2) AND NOT (Query 3). In this case, Query 2 is a nested query, and will be evaluated together with Query 1 before evaluating Query 3.

Relative date searching

Searching by date is now easily accomplished for Relative dates. For instance, in the lybunt search above, we used last fiscal to last fiscal for the date values, which means that search will always be current, relative to whatever date you run it.

Additional search functions

Several new search matching functions for different types of fields are now available:

• Text fields. You can match on text fields with the following methods: Contains, Does not contain, Equals, Does not equal, Is blank, or Is not blank. The one special case here is the Constituent “Names” search, which queries multiple name fields, and only supports “Contains” and “Does not contain” searches.
• Numeric fields. You can query numeric fields for values that are Greater than/equal, Less than/equal, Between (a range search), Greater than, Less than, Equals, and Does not equal. The Between search is inclusive on both ends, so that a search for gifts between $50 and $100 will include gifts of both $50 and $100, and everything in between.
• Menu-driven fields. Menu-driven and multiple choice fields all support searches that Include a set of values, or Do not include a set of values.

Recap

All of these new features will make it easier to get the exact set of records that you want/need, and they go hand in hand with a major upgrade to LGL’s reporting functionality. We’ll cover the new reporting features in a separate post very soon.