Track Your Projects with the Search Export Feature

Exporting the results of a search object can be a useful way to keep track of changes to a project. The Search Export feature enables you to perform a search for either a specific object in a project or for a group of objects that meet certain criteria. After the search is performed, you can save your search definition and search results to a text file, and save the search object itself for later reuse.

For example, you can create a search object in the development project that returns all objects that have been changed after a certain date. This lets you know what objects have been updated and need to be migrated to the test project. For more information about development and test projects, see The Project Life Cycle.

The search export file contains the following information:

• The user who was logged in when the search was performed.
• The search type, date and time, and project name.
• Any search criteria entered into the tabs of the Search for Objects dialog box.
• Any miscellaneous settings in Developer that affected the search (such as whether hidden and managed objects were included in the search).
• A list of all the objects returned by the search, including any folders. The list includes object names and paths (object locations in the Developer interface).

To Search for Objects and Save the Results in a Text File

1. In Developer, from the Tools menu, select Search for Objects.
2. Perform your search.
3. After your search is complete, from the Tools menu in the Search for Objects dialog box, select Export to Text. The text file is saved by default to C:\Program Files (x86)\MicroStrategy\Desktop\ SearchResults_<date and timestamp>.txt, where <date and timestamp> is the day and time when the search was saved. For example, the text file named SearchResult_022607152554.txt was saved on February 26, 2007, at 15:25:54, or 3:25 PM.