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Searching for assets and artifacts across the platform

Searching for assets and artifacts across the platform

You can use the global search bar to search for assets across all the projects, deployment spaces, and catalogs to which you have access. You can also search for governance artifacts across the categories to which you have access.

Requirements and restrictions

You can find assets and artifacts under the following circumstances.

Required services

None. Search is always available.

Required permissions

You can have any role in projects, catalogs, or deployment spaces to find assets.

You can have any role in categories to find governance artifacts.

Workspaces

You can search for assets that are in these workspaces:

  • Projects
  • Catalogs
  • Deployment spaces

You can search for governance artifacts that are in categories.

Types of assets

You can search for all types of assets.

Restrictions

When you are added as a category collaborator, you might need to wait up to 20 minutes before you can search for governance artifacts in that category.

Your search results include only assets and artifacts in workspaces that you belong to.

Searching for properties

Using key:value pairs in the search bar, you can search within asset and artifact properties, such as the description, tags, custom properties, column names, and many more. The highest priority is always given to the asset or artifact name.

For the out of the box properties you can provide the following search keys. The search drop-down provides auto-complete suggestions for these keys. Note that for some of these keys only exact match is supported in search results, when some of them support partial match.

Property name Key to use in search Description Partial match supported?
Name name: Search within the name of an asset or artifact. Yes
Description desc: Search within the description of an asset or artifact. Yes
Business terms term: Search in assets and artifacts with a specific business term assigned. Yes
Tags tag: Search in assets and artifacts with a specific tag. Yes
Primary category category: Search for artifacts with the specified primary category. Yes
Secondary categories category2: Search for artifacts with the specified secondary category. Yes
Classifications classification: Search by the classification of an asset or artifact. Yes
Abbreviation abbr: Search by the abbreviation of a business term. No
Synonyms syn: Search by the synonym of a business term. No
Name (column) column: Search within the name of a column in a data asset. Yes
Description (column) columnDesc: Search within the description of a column in a data asset. Yes
Tags (column) columnTag: Search with a tag on a column in a data asset. Yes
Business term (column) columnTerm: Search with a business term assigned to a column in a data asset. Yes
Data class (column) columnDataclass: Search with a data class of a column in a data asset. No
Connection path connection: Search with a connection path for an asset. Yes
Schema name schema: Search for data assets with the specified schema name. Yes
Table name table: Search for data assets with the specified table name. Yes
Resource key resourceKey: Search with a resource key for an asset. No

You can search using the keys in the following ways:

  • Provide a key:value pair in the search bar to search within a specific property. For example, to search for assets that have the word customer in their name, use the following pair: name:customer. If the value consists of multiple words, include them in quotes, for example name:"sales report"
  • Use multiple key:value pairs to further refine your search, for example: name:sales type:report. The search results will include all assets with sale in the name field and report in the type field.
  • Combine the key:value pair with any text string, such as: name:sales report. The word sales is searched for in the name field, and the word report as a regular string.
  • Combine the key:value pair with the filter pill to further refine your search.

Ensure there is no space after key: as in key: value because such phrase is not treated as a pair by search.

Searching for asset and artifact custom properties

You can also use a key:value pair to search within custom properties of the assets or artifacts. Note that auto-complete suggestions are not available for custom properties, you must provide the key exactly as it is saved in the system.

You can use the following API call to retrieve the list of custom properties for a specific artifact:

GET /v3/governance_artifact_types/{artifact_type}/custom_attribute_definitions

For assets, the key consists of the group identifier and the custom property identifier connected with a dot: CP_group_unique_identifier.CP_unique_identifier.

To retrieve these identifiers from the UI, open the custom property or a group, and click Edit, then click Show identifier.

To retrieve the unique identifiers with API:

  1. Use the following API to retrieve group identifiers:

    GET /v2/asset_types/{type_name}
    

    The unique identifiers for custom property groups are listed in the decorated_by property.

  2. Use the same endpoint but providing the custom property group unique identifier as the asset type_name to get the identifiers of the custom properties included in this group.

Note that custom attributes must be defined as searchable to work in the global search bar. To check whether a custom property is searchable:

  • Use the following query to verify which fields are marked as global_search_searchable for an asset type:
GET /v2/asset_types/{asset_type_name}

Selecting results

To select the best result, look at which property of the asset or artifact matches your search string. The matching text is highlighted. When searching by custom properties, the matching text is currently not visible in the search results.

The following image shows what search results might look like.

Search results show matching assets and artifacts.

The highest scoring results are for matches to the name of the asset or artifact. Multiple assets and artifacts can have the same name. However, the name of the project, catalog, deployment space, or category is shown underneath the asset or artifact name so you can determine which result is the one you want.

Click an asset or artifact name to view it in its project, catalog, deployment space, or category.

Results are prioritized in this order:

  1. Matches of quoted phrases or common phrases (for English only)
  2. Exact matches of complete words
  3. Partial matches of complete words
  4. Fuzzy matches

From the search results, you can click Preview to view more information in the side panel. You can also publish an asset from a project to a catalog with the Publish to catalog button, or add an asset from a catalog to a project using the Add to project button.

Filtering and sorting results

You can filter search results by these properties:

  • Type of asset or artifact
  • Tags
  • Stewards or owners (for some types of assets and artifacts)
  • The user who modified the asset or artifact
  • The time period when the asset or artifact was last modified
  • Category (artifacts only)
  • Catalog (assets only)
  • Projects (assets only)
  • Workspaces
  • Column term
  • Column data class
  • Schema
  • Table
  • Classifications (assets only)
  • Business terms
  • Contains: Feature group

You can sort results by the most relevant or the last modified date.

Learn more

Parent topic: Asset types and properties

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