Search Page

The “Search Page” allows you to search the OpenEMPI repository for records that match certain criteria. There are two tabs available on the page: the “Attributes” tab lets you search using record attributes as the search criteria and the “Identifiers” tab lets you search using identifiers associated with the record.

Search by Attributes

The “Search by Attributes” page allows you to search the repository using attributes of the record as search criteria. The records returned by the search are records whose values for the attributes match the search values specified in the request. In addition to searching for exact values, you can also use wildcard characters ‘%' (matches any string) and '_’ (matches a single character) as part of the value specified for a given field. The fields that are available as search criteria are the fields that are marked as “Searchable” fields in the entity definition.

In the following example, the user searched for records that have the value “James” for the given name field and whose family name starts with the character “P”.

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Search by Identifiers

The “Search by Identifiers” page allows you to search the repository using an identifier as search criteria. The records returned by the search are records that have one or more identifiers that matched the identifier specified in the search criteria. In addition to searching for exact values, you can also use wildcard characters ‘%' (matches any string) and '_’ (matches a single character) as part of the value specified for the identifier.

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Search Results

Searching for records using either the “Search by Attributes” or “Search by Identifiers” approach, will result in the matching records to be presented on the table below the search panel. You can interact with the whole list of records using the controls available to the right of the table or you can interact with individual records. The four buttons on the top right above the table allow you to take actions against all the records in the result set. The function of each of the four buttons from left to right is:

1. download all the records returned from the search operation

2. print all the records

3. select which columns are displayed on the table

4. filter the results in the table by using one or more fields

To view all the data associated with a specific record, you can just click on the row of the record. This will take you to the view record page which includes metadata, identifiers and fields values for the selected record.

Clicking the checkbox associated with a record changes the options at the top of the search results table and presents the options to either edit or delete the record.

Pressing the Delete button presents a confirmation button where you need to confirm the operation before the record is deleted. Pressing the Edit button presents the Edit Record page.

Record Update History

Starting with version 4.3.3 of OpenEMPI, we added a Record Update History feature. This allows the user to review the sequence of update operations that have been applied to a record over time. Before the update history of a record is tracked and is then available to review, the feature must be enabled for the site. You can read about how to enable the the Record Update History feature in the documentation for the Administrative Settings page.

You can review the update history of a record by clicking on the History button which is visible at the top right corner of the record detail page. Note that the History button will only show up if the selected record has an update history (has been updated at least once in the past).

Pressing the History button will bring you to the Record Update History page where you can see all the updates that have been applied on the record. The table presents one entry for each event in increasing chronological order. The first record represents the record creation event and every entry in the table after that, represents an update operation applied to the record. Each row in the table includes the time that the event took place and the username of the user that performed the operation.

You can view the details of the update operation by clicking on a row in the table. Clicking on an entry will display the details of the changes that were made by the update operation between the selected entry and the next entry in the table. The field or fields that were changed by the update operation, will be highlighted by the background color. You can also scan through the updates that have been applied on the record by pressing the Next and Previous buttons at the bottom of the dialog box.

Search by Record IDs

The Search by “Record IDs” tab allows you to search for specific records when you know their unique record identifiers. This approach for searching for records also offers some unique functionalities that are not available through the other two search mechanism. You can enter one or more record IDs separated by commas at the prompt and the search results will display those records if they are found in the system. In the example below, we searched for the two records with record IDs 1816 and 2043 and since they were both found in the system, they were displayed in the results portion of the page.

If you select two records by checking on the corresponding check boxes, you will be presented with two menu options at the top right corner of the results table. The first option allows you to link the two records together (if they don’t already have an association between them) and the second option allows you to review the similarity between the two records based on the configuration of the matching algorithm.

Link Records

If you click on the “Link Records” button after selecting two records from the results table, you will be prompted to confirm that you want to go ahead with the action. If you do confirm, the two records will be linked together. Note that we don’t recommend that you use this feature extensively because it may cause confusion later on. The fact that the two records have not already been linked together implies that based on the current settings of the matching algorithm, the two records should not be linked together. This feature basically allows you to manually link these two records together despite the matching algorithms classification decision. It is preferable that you adjust the settings of the matching algorithm to classify this pair as either a match or a probable match but we do realize that there are occasions where this may not be possible.

Evaluate Pair

If you click on the “Evaluate Pair” button, the system will invoke the matching algorithm against these two records and present the results of the evaluation in a modal dialog that will be presented to the user. In the example below, the two records were classified according to vector pattern 59 which corresponds to the case where you have disagreement between the date of birth and phone number fields. The display of the two records side-by-side highlights the fact that the dates of birth differ between the two records. It is also apparent that both records are missing the phone number field.