Searching Specific Fields for a Query Word

When searching a database in which records have been organized into fields, you can formulate queries that consider only a specified field or range of fields within each record. Moreover, you can search particular fields for terms that match a specified alphanumeric value or for fields that fall within a specified range of values.

You can use the word-level field restriction operator--the colon--to search one or more fields for a particular query term.

Syntax:

word:field1,field20

where word is the query term to be sought and field specifies one or more fields to which the search will be restricted; if you specify multiple fields, their names must be separated by commas. You can use partial field names with this operator.

The word-level field restriction operator will be distributed through scope of operation delimiters. For example, the following query:

(Harding AND Gillooly):defendant

is equivalent to:

Harding:defendant AND Gillooly:defendant

Examples:

Renfield:name,supervisor
Abdul:author AND Necronomicon:title

The first query will retrieve records that contain Renfield in either of the name or supervisor fields.

The second query will retrieve records that contain Alhazred in the author field and Necronomicon in the title field.

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