"Find item" operation

This operation is similar to the “Find member” operation. We could define the Item query that would find an item by author, title and code. In this case, however, we will give different categories of users different abilities to perform a search on items. Operators will have the ability to search by any attribute of the Item object using the form of the Item object. If an operator enters any information in any field on the form the system will perform a search based on the entered information only, ignoring any blank fields. For more details on how this works see “searching for data using forms”.

To give operators the ability to perform the form-based search we will configure a query called “Item using form”. When adding this query we will click on the “Use form” property in the list of query properties and then select the form of the Item object to use. This will indicate that the query will not have any conditions – all conditions will be determined at run time when a user fills in the query form.

We will also define the “Item” query that will search items by author, title and code – we will use this query for members only (we will cover this later). We can also allow operators to use this method as an alternative to a form-based search. Configuring such a query is very similar to configuring the “Member” query.