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Using Wildcards in Transaction Processing (TP)

DaFIS Transaction Processing provides the ability to use wildcards in many searches. These wildcards can be used to substitute for unknown character strings, to include a range of values, or to exclude specific values.

Note: Nothing will appear on your screen until the entire wildcard has been entered. A dot will appear before the wildcard when it is correctly entered. If this dot is not visible, then the wildcard will not function properly.

Laptops/Computers without a Numeric Pad: Refer to the FAQ for the necessary keyboard combination to create the wildcard.

Search Examples

• Troubleshooting Wildcards
  
• Advanced Wildcard Searches

Wildcard Key

Most Commonly Used Wildcards
Numeric Pad	And...	Results/Purpose	Example	How it Looks on the Screen
		Used to fill in for an unlimited number of unknown characters.	Search for Amazon.com, type: AMAZON	AMAZON·*
		Less than ( < ) condition	Dates prior to July 1st, 2008, type: 07/01/2008	·<07/01/2008
		Greater than ( > ) condition	Dates after July 1, 2008, type: 07/01/2008	·>07/01/2008

Additional Wildcards
Numeric Pad	And...	Results/Purpose	Example	How it Looks on the Screen
		Used to fill in for exactly one unknown character.	To find accounts in a series, type: ACDF01	ACDF01·?
		And ( & ) condition.	See Advanced Wildcard Searches below
		Or ( | ) condition	See Advanced Wildcard Searches below
		Equal to ( = ) condition (Note: the = is not shifted)	To find a $25.75 transaction, type: 25.75	·=25.75
		Not equal to ( ! ) condition	Find documents not canceled, type: C	·!C

Troubleshooting Wildcards

So you've done a wildcard search, but you don't get results. Here are some things to try:

• If you're using the wildcard before or after a name, try using it in both places. There are sometimes extra letters or spaces you aren't aware of. You can also put it between two words/names to account for any spaces or punctuation.
• Make sure that you are using the on the number pad. You can confirm this by making sure the · is appearing in front of your wildcard character in the search field (such as ·*AMAZON·*)

Advanced Wildcard Searches

There may be times when the standard wildcards in a field won't yield the desired results. In those cases, you may need to use multiple wildcards.

• Date Range Search - a search for documents initiated during a specific date range could be done using the following in the Date field on the document search screen:
  
  01/01/2009 03/31/2009
  
  This example would return all documents initiated between 1/1/2009 and 3/31/2009.


• Multiple Name Search - for a situation where you aren't sure of a name, or it could possibly have been one of a couple of names (e.g., where you're working with a business owned by a large corporation), you can do an "OR" search in the Description field of document search:
  
  RADIO TANDY
  
  This example would return all documents where "radio" or "tandy" appeared in the description. Since the vendor name appears in the description field for purchasing and AP documents, you could add a document type to your search criteria, and return all vendor invoices (VI type) made out to a vendor with "radio" or "tandy" in their name (such as Radio Shack and their parent company Tandy).