contains

New in Domino 11: In addition to using NSF scanning and view indexes, DQL provides the contains operator to process queries against full text indexes. A database must have a full text index to be processed in this way.

Use contains to search for text strings in a specific field or across all fields in a document.

The following two examples search for text strings in specific fields:
Sales_person contains (‘Trudi’, ‘Jack*’)
Order_description contains all (‘diagonal’, ‘brushed nickel’, ‘cap*’)
The following two examples omit field names and search for text strings across all text fields in a document:
contains ('Mercury', 'spinning wildly', 'orbit*')
contains all ('Tiger Lily', 'Pete*', 'Lost boy?')

all Use all to find only documents that contain all of the specified strings. Omit all to find documents with any of the specified strings.

wildcards Use the * (asterisk) wildcard to match multiple characters. Use the ? (question mark) wildcard to match a single character.

Wildcards must be part of a string that contains non-wildcard characters. Freestanding wildcards aren't supported. For example, the following queries are valid use of wildcards:
short_description contains (‘??????hold*’)
finds threshold and thresholding.
short_description contains (‘hold?n*’)
finds each of the following: holding, holdon, or holden.
However, the following queries have freestanding wildcards and return nothing:
short_description contains (‘*’)
short_description contains (‘hold *’) 
blank spaces Blank spaces in query terms are ignored. For example, the following queries return the same results:
short_description contains ('hold')
short_description contains (' hold   ')
Additional information
  • It finds text values only. Numbers and timedates are not searchable.
  • It is often the fastest method of searching document contents.
  • It requires a full text index. Queries fail to compile if a database does not have a full text index.
  • contains and = are not equivalent: contains searches for a text string while = searches for the entire content of a field. For example, if a document includes the field sales_person with value ‘Trudi Ayton’, only the first of the following two queries finds it:
    sales_person contains (‘Trudi’)
    sales_person = ‘Trudi’