Hi all, I am looking into some search configuration for SCA on behalf of a client. I've noticed that searching for terms with dashes seems to ignore the dashes and treat them instead as spaces. This is causing some issues as they have a field that holds a number of alternate SKUs for the product (i.e. manufacturer/competitor SKUs). I have my search configuration setup to match on this field using Keyword matches, but as a number of the SKUs have dashes in them they can often return incorrect results. For example I have a SKU

105-7781-03

, but this is being treated as 3 individual search phrases:

105

7781

03

. There are other SKUs that contain these numbers, but not this exact sequence which is confusing some customers, as they think they are actually getting a match on the full SKU. Is there some way to force the search to include the dashes? Like in Google search you can add quotations around a search term to force a match on a certain group of letters/symbols/words. So far if I attempt to add quotations SCA removes them for me. Happy to hear other's thoughts and experience on this matter.

what version of SCA are you working with?

Have this exact same experience with SCA elbrus, SKUs similar to

AW-400-E-L-S

with keyword matching produce so many false results Feb' 2019 we even had a call with NS to discuss our SCA search requirements, but were told that there wasn't a fix for it at the time

@Kearobi Running SCA 2019.2 - I was fairly sure that search functionality is the same for all versions of SCA though. That's a what I'm afraid of too @David B 😬

Have you enabled "exact match" in your search fields? https://netsuite.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/27833

Unfortunately @Steve Goldberg the field contains numerous SKUs, all comma separated, so we can't use the Exact Match for the search field as a user will only enter one of the SKUs, not all SKUs, and certainly not in the same order. From what you're saying though it sounds like using exact match will be the only way to get around this issue - there isn't another way to configure the search to honour symbols instead of ignoring them? If so, I suppose we could look into setting up a bunch of individual fields, one for each SKU and add them all individually to the search as 'Exact Match'. 🤔

So, for the SKU field, you have items that have it set to, for example, "123-345-67, 234-345-56, 123-345-76" etc? I'm no data expert but that doesn't seem like a good practice to me

Hey @Steve Goldberg, yes that's correct, however, this is only for secondary SKUs. The main SKU is using it's own dedicated field as per best practice. Because these products often have multiple other SKUs that they are known by in the industry, from suppliers or from other vendors there is a dedicated field to list all the alternate SKUs. So to re-iterate my question, is there a high level setting to tweak or a certain search query syntax that will allow a full SKU to be searched, instead of it breaking apart at the dashes in the string? If not it sounds like they may need to create a bunch of fields for 'Alternate SKU 1', 'Alternate SKU 2', etc. so they can get matches using the exact match instead of the keyword or advise their customers that they can't rely on the alternate SKUs as a reliable method of searching for products.

OK yeah, got a bit sidetracked. I don't know what the deal is with using dashes, whether or not there is a way to tell the system to treat them as part of a whole word