Searching in FogBugz

FogBugz Search works pretty much as you expect: you type your search terms in the box, and click Search.

You can go directly to any case number by typing just a number. If you're actually searching for a number within your case text, just put it in quotation marks (e.g., "456").

Any search can be saved as a filter, either by clicking on the disk icon in the Search Tools box in the upper right corner of the results page, or from the Filters menu.  

FogBugz will initially return a maximum of 45 case results or 10 wiki or discussion group results, sorted by relevance, with a link to "List all" to see the rest of the results.

FogBugz also supports advanced search queries.

Use axis:query to search specific fields. title:pear will find everything with the word pear in the title. -title:pear will find everything without the word pear in the title.

You can  also combine axes with Boolean queries and parentheses.  newfeature (assignedto:Tester1 OR assignedto:Tester2) (resolvedby:Developer1 OR resolvedby:Developer2) will return all cases that mention newfeature that have been resolved by either Developer1 or Developer2 that are currently assigned to Tester1 or Tester2. 

Note that OR has a lower priority than the implied AND, so assignedto:Tester1 OR assignedto:Tester2 resolvedby:Developer1 will return all cases assigned to Tester1 as well as cases that are both assigned to Tester2 and resolved by Developer1. To get the result of cases resolved by Developer1 that are assigned to Tester1 or Tester2, use parentheses: (assignedto:Tester1 OR assignedto:Tester2) resolvedby:Developer1

Combining action: and actionby: axes (e.g. edited/editedby, or opened/openedby) has a special behavior, where the FogBugz searcher links the two searches. For instance, in the case of editedby:me edited:today, FogBugz will return only cases that I edited today, rather than the strict intersection which would be the cases I edited at some point which were also edited by somebody (not necessarily me) today. If you want to search for a case edited by more than one person, please use the syntax of editedby:me alsoeditedby:michael.

Use the type axis to specify what type of documents you wish to search. type:case will search for cases, type:wiki will search for wiki pages, and type:discuss will search for discussion topics. If you use a search axis such as edited that applies to all types of documents, FogBugz will return a summary of search results organized by document type.

You can search dates and date ranges (use .. to indicate date ranges). Here are some date search examples:

As of FogBugz 7.1.11, you can also search for dates and times relative to the current time, too, using a special syntax of + or - a certain number of minutes, hours, days, or weeks, (m, h, d, w, respectively). This is shorthand for a date and time relative to the current exact time (which can be expressed as now). If the current date and time is 12/25/2009 8am, then "-3w" will translate to 12/4/2009 8am.

Note that relative search times are not rounded. For instance, opened:"yesterday.." will show you everything opened from the beginning of yesterday up to the current moment, whereas opened:"-1d.." will show you everything opened in the last 24 hours, exactly.

+'s are implied, so due:"now..+5m" is equivalent to due:"now..5m".

..'s are not implied, so while edited:"-20m.." means "edited within the last 20 minutes", edited:"-20m" means "edited exactly 20 minutes ago".

Axes for searching cases

In general, an axis can be formed from the title of any column in the grid view by removing the spaces e.g. the "Assigned To" column becomes the "assignedto:" axis. To find out what possible values are available for a given axis, add the corresponding column to the grid view of a filter and see what values are listed.

Axes for searching wiki pages

Axes for searching discussion topics

About the FogBugz Search Engine

For performance and search quality, FogBugz has its own full-text search engine, based on Apache's Lucene.NET.

FogBugz builds its index in the background, and updates it frequently. However:

• Things entered into FogBugz very recently may not yet be indexed.
• Building the index for the first time can take hours or days, depending on the size of your FogBugz database.

Go to Admin | Site and click on the Search tab to see the status of the index, and what percentage of your database is indexed.

On rare occasions when the index is not available or missing large amounts of data, FogBugz starts re-indexing with the most recently updated cases first, in an attempt to get the most relevant cases into the index as soon as possible.