1. Types of Search

Finding a particular SWE or Topic in SWEHB can be difficult. The handbook is a large collection of pages, each page is dedicated to a different subject. Also, there are currently 4 versions of the SWEHB available, each one based on a different version of NPR 7150.2.

This topic describes several types of searching that can be done in SWEHB along with examples of how to use them in different browsers.

1.1 Keywords

Whenever you search for something it is very helpful if you use a unique word or short phrase that you know will be on the page you want. here are some tips when deciding what keyword or phrase you will search on:

make it a unique word that is not likely to be found in a large number of target pages
when using a phrase, try to make it only two or three words at the most
when using a phrase, enclose it in quotes or your search will retrieve all words individually. Example: "Commercial Crew"

2. Browser "Find" Command

2.1 Microsoft Edge

Site Resources > 1.01 - Searching in SWEHB > image2023-1-27_11-14-45.png In Edge, the find command is initiated using Ctrl-F when viewing the page.

Type in the search word and as you type, find shows you the number of hits for the string you have typed. In this example "design", there were 10 hits and the focus was set to the second one on the page. Using the "^" and "V" arrows you can navigate to each of the hits.

On a long list of SWEs or Topics, this technique will help you get quickly:

to a SWE by typing only the 3 digit number
to a topic by typing the topic number or a word in the title
to a word on a long Guidance page by typing the word.

2.2 Google Chrome

Site Resources > 1.01 - Searching in SWEHB > image2023-1-27_11-15-43.png In Chrome, the find command is initiated using Ctrl-F when viewing the page.

Type in the search word and as you type, find shows you the number of hits for the string you have typed. In this example "design", there were 8 hits and the focus was set to the second one on the page. Using the "^" and "V" arrows you can navigate to each of the hits.

On a long list of SWEs or Topics, this technique will help you get quickly:

to a SWE by typing only the 3 digit number
to a topic by typing the topic number or a word in the title
to a word on a long Guidance page by typing the word.

2.3 Firefox

In Firefox, the find command is initiated using Ctrl-F when viewing the page.

Type in the search word and as you type, find shows you the number of hits for the string you have typed. In this example "design", there were 10 hits and the focus was set to the second one on the page. Using the "^" and "V" arrows you can navigate to each of the hits.

On a long list of SWEs or Topics, this technique will help you get quickly:

to a SWE by typing only the 3 digit number
to a topic by typing the topic number or a word in the title
to a word on a long Guidance page by typing the word.

2.4 Mac Safari

3. SWEHB Search

There is a search function in SWEHB that comes from Confluence. The search function as access to all of the Confluence spaces on the server and as a result it may give you more results than you want to sift through. It is browser independent.

3.1 Initiating a search

To start a search in SWEHB, start typing your search word in the Search box in the header. In this case it is the word design.

Site Resources > 1.01 - Searching in SWEHB > image2023-1-27_11-25-14.png

You can see from the search results that 1279 hits were obtained. You can also see some data about each result:

icon indicating the type of result like a page
Title of the page
location of the page - for example, Site Resources, or SW Engineering Handbook Ver D
the next two lines show a piece of text on the page where the search word was found. It may help you decide if this hit is one that you want or not. This will help you find the exact location on the page.

There are too many hits for this word so let's refine the search a little.

3.2 Refining the Search Using Filters

There are two filters that will help us when using SWEHB. "Space" and Type. The other filters are not very helpful.

Space

Site Resources > 1.01 - Searching in SWEHB > image2023-1-27_11-35-20.png

If you click on Space, the dropdown menu show spaces that contain your search word. The two spaces that will be of interest to you are

the top one that has the "CURRENT" highlighted in blue. that it the current space that you started the search in.
"Site Resources" this is a companion space that has a lot of content that is appropriate for the current space.

Select these two spaces by clicking in the selection boxes on the left and see what this does to your total number of hits.

Using only the current space, the number of hits went down to 240. Adding the Site Resources space the number of hits went up to 402.

Type

Site Resources > 1.01 - Searching in SWEHB > image2023-1-27_11-41-57.png This filter has several entries that may be of value in your search.

Page restricts the search to only pages.
Attachment restricts the search to attachments. this includes Word documents, PDFs, etc. This may be valuable if you want to search in those things.
Blog post may be useful but is limited since there are so few blog posts in use.

The other types (Space, User, Comment, Mail) are not very helpful.

Selecting Page reduced the hit count from 402 to 394. Adding Attachment brought the hit count back up to 402.

3.3 Exploring the Hits

Site Resources > 1.01 - Searching in SWEHB > image2023-1-27_11-49-39.png In this search we looked for the word "design" and got a lot of hits on pages. If we were looking only for SWE pages, we could scan quickly down the list and pick out the hits that start with "SWE".

If we were looking for the Design Description document, we could find that pretty easily by scanning down the list.

Since each hit contains the page title as a link, you could right click on a title and open it in a new tab.

If you wanted to do a little more with the results, you could highlight the results and copy them all into an Excel Spreadsheet and do some more advanced searching and sorting with that tool.

3.4 Search With More Than One Word

Site Resources > 1.01 - Searching in SWEHB > image2023-1-27_11-59-13.png To zero in faster on your search for "design document", you could type that into the search field. Be sure to enclose the two words in quotation marks so the the search function looks for both words in that exact order. Using the quotation marks turns the words into a search string of characters that the search function will look for.

Now we see that the search results are narrowed from 402 hits down to 38 hits. Also, there is at least one PDF that contains the search string.

You can open any of these pages, or other links, and continue your search manually for the search words.

4. Beyond Search

There are additional things you can do beyond a simple word or phrase search. Here are a few to consider.

4.1 Confluence Advanced Search

If you click on the "Search Tips" link at the right side of the search results window, you will open a page with more details on how to use search. Some of the more advanced methods are beyond the scope of this topic but you are welcome to explore them if you wish.

4.2 Confluence Syntax Search

You can create an advanced search query using Confluence search syntax. These are special words and symbols you enter into the search field to narrow the focus of your search. The Confluence Search Syntax page covers more details on searching.

4.3 Adding power with Excel

Site Resources > 1.01 - Searching in SWEHB > image2023-1-29_10-40-37.png Search results may be copied and pasted into Excel to give you even more powerful search and other capabilities.

In this example, some of the results from Design have been highlighted. You would probably want to highlight the whole set of results to paste into Excel.

Once you paste the results into Excel you will need to manipulate the data into a usable format. Then you can use Excel search and other data sorting and filtering tools to isolate the items that you want.