Searching for specific labels on Questions (problem with wildcards)

Shawn Connelly

Hello all,

I discovered a possible problem with Questions searching...

Requirement: I have been asked to find a way to list out all Confluence Questions that include any variation of a specific label (or topic). Example: search for "security" but also find labels/topics like "data-security", "coe-security", "security-fix", etc. 

When using Questions > Topics and searching from there... you will see all variations of the search topic (if they exist). The problem is that it's not a consolidated list; each topic is a separate list.



The Problem
Searching from Advanced Search > Custom (Questions), using Search: labelText:security (or with * wildcard on either side, or any variation of wildcard *) results in ONLY specific "security" labels. In other words, the resulting list does not show compound labels/any label with a hyphen. 

Wild Cards Sort of Work?
Further testing reveals the following behavior:

• labelText:security* will find any topic with security to the left of the entire topic name. Example: securitytest is found.
• labelText:*security will only list the specific topic, "security".

There doesn't seem to be a way to find topics hyphenated topics that include "security".


Am I doing something wrong, or is this a bug?

Thank you

Diego_88dj6o

Hello there! Thanks for reaching out to Community.

When we use wildcards like this:

abelText:*security

The search will look into results that contains any kind of text before the word security. Having a wildcard before a word and no wildcard after the word will prompt the search to look into results that ends with security and may or may not have any type of text before it.

For example, if you had a label like top-security the search above should be able to find it.

If we use the wildcards like this:

abelText:*security*

The search should look into results that have security in any part of the string. Meaning that the hyphenated should come up.

I tried to replicate it on a local instance and was unable to. Looking forward to your reply Shawn!