Searching in Custom Tables
Harvest is able to contain custom forms and tables (spreadsheets) for each church, person or organization. For example, you may find information for workshops held at a church, or extra membership information for a certain denomination.
Searching for table-based information is a bit different from searching for normal fields. The difference is that there can be multiple instances of a field for a single church, which has it's influence on the search results.
For example, consider the following custom table for 'Workshops' added to a church:
Imagine one wants to search for churches that have had workshops with an attendance larger than 20. Would this church fit the criteria?
- On the one hand it does, since there was one workshop with an attendance larger than 24.
- On the other hand it does not, since not all workshops were larger than 20 people.
We need to be more specific, and Harvest allows you to do that.
When searching for the field 'attendance', it will look a bit different from a normal search field:
Besides the usual components, you can choose between 'Match Any' and 'Match All':
Match Any: A church only needs to have one (or more) workshops with 20 or more attendees to show up in the search results.
Match All: All workshops that were performed at the church must have 20 or more attendees. If only one workshop has less than 20 attendees, the church will not be included in the search results.
Tip: If you want to search for a church that has no attendance information filled in at all, you should select 'Match All' and 'Is Empty'.
Contrary to normal search criteria, one needs to be careful when searching for multiple criteria on a custom table. For example, the following search will yield non-intuitive results:
One might expect to find all churches that have had a workshop after 20-Jan-2016 with 20 or more attendees. When we look at the example church above, there was no such workshop. There only workshop with more than 20 attendees was held before 20th of January. So we would expect that church not to show in the results.
However, the church would still be included in the results. Why? Harvest will find all churches that have had at least one workshop before the first of january 2016 and one workshop greater than 20, but this does not have to be the same workshop. In the example case above, there are workshops that meet the criteria, so the church will show in the results.