DreamLife S60 Tutorials

Intro: Various Search Methods

DreamLife’s search facility is powerful and provides a variety of methods that you can use in isolation or combined to quickly locate the contact that you are after.

There are several different ways of finding a person or company in DreamLife. Fast filter allows you to quickly locate a contact, KeyMatch transforms your multi-tap numeric keypad into a single tap search input, and Global Find gives you the ability to search deep within your contacts. With the addition of sort orders and categories, they combine to provide quick and accurate search of contacts.

Now, lets look at each of these in more detail.

Fast Filter

DreamLife’s fast filter behaves the same way as in the standard Contacts. It will search the contacts list for words that start with the search text. For example, if you are looking for David Hall and you entered “d”, "a" and “v”, fast filter will then display results of names that have their first name or last name starting with “dav”. DreamLife can also fast filter on company or country names when sort options containing them are selected.

KeyMatch

The KeyMatch feature of DreamLife reduces the number of key presses required for numeric and virtual keypads. KeyMatch lets you tap the key containing that letter once. It will then return results that match any of the letters and the number on the keys you typed.  So tapping the 2 key enters [2abc], which matches the number 2 or the letters a, b, or c.

For example, to search for "Harris," you would only need to press "4, 2, 7, 7, 7 and 4".

Global Find

For times when simple fast filter doesn’t provide the results needed, DreamLife provides a more advanced search facility that allows you to search outside a contact’s names and company name. DreamLife will look for the text you enter into the Global Find dialog in all the fields within your contacts database. This includes searching through the notes, email addresses and phone numbers of a contact.

Example: Multi-Function Search

Here is an example to show you how to search using a combination of features.

Suppose that you wanted to go to the UK (from somewhere else), and remembered that a friend of yours in Smart Design had a brother who lived there. You want to get in touch, but you can’t even remember your friend’s name, let alone his brother! What to do?

Fast filter starts from the first character of each field in the contact list entries, and the list entries are formatted based on the sorting rules. Therefore you should sort contacts based on the details that you use most often.

In this example, we usually think of people by their given (first) name followed by last name, so we’ve set the default sort option to display first and last name of contacts.

Now we want to find this friend in Smart Design, but Smart Design is a company, so we have 3 choices:

• change the sorting rules so that company is shown
• search in the category Business
• do a global find on Smart Design

The first is slower, and we’ll have to change the sorting rules back again. We discovered that we don’t have a sub-category for Smart Design. So lets do a global find on Smart Design.

Now we have only contacts matching "smart design".

We think our friend's name is Caiden Harris. Now to find his brother. Obviously he’ll have the same last name, so lets key match to fast filter him. This time, on "harris".

There are a few Harris’ and we are not sure which one, but we know that he lives in the UK. We can tap on each entry to look at the details or change the sorting rule to display home country detail. Lets change the sorting rule.

Yep, that’s the guy. Mission accomplished!

So, there you go, an example of how to use multiple features together to make finding contacts easier and quicker than ever!{/slide}