How to Make the Most of Visual Expert Global Search?

Apart from the Quick Search feature, Visual Expert allows you to run a global search across your application (and also across multiple applications!). Visual Expert doesn't run a regular text search like most applications: as well as giving you the location of the item directly in the source code, the VE search gives you rich results including type, container, and hierarchy information. Because of this, the search may take some time to load.

There are a couple of tricks to making the process run faster:

To really speed up the search, specify the string of code you wish to search for in the Source code field and use regular expressions/Match Case to narrow down your search even more.

Search in your source code using regular expressions

Filling in the second line, component name, will also help to speed up the search; however, because VE uses an algorithm to cross reference the source field with the component field, the search may still take some time to return results.

Limit the search to a certain type of object

Note that using the "Search into:" box will not necessarily speed up your search, as this filter is processed after Visual Expert has fetched the container and hierarchy information.

Finally, we do recommend keeping “Show parent hierarchy” selected for a richer result.

Show parent hierarchy

Type your search term and click on [Start Search] under the Search tab.
Keep the [Show parent hierarchy] checked for better results.

Global Search Feature - Visual Expert

The results will be provided in the following format:

A - List of items found throughout the Visual Expert project.
B - Location of search results in the code organized by line
C - Number of occurrences of the searched text
D - Displays the line numbers corresponding to the searched item. Visible lines are highlighted for easier consultation and navigation to specific lines by clicking on them.

Global Search Feature Results - Visual Expert

 

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