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The  Advanced Search block provides the user with a customized tool to search for courses on the LMS that they may want to enrol in.

To add the enhanced searching option to your LMS, turn on Front Page editing in Front Page settings and then go to Add a block and select Advanced Search:

The block then appears on the Front Page of the LMS:

Basic Searching

The drop-down menu of the search field provides three standard search parameters: CourseCategory, Course Name and Summary:

Note: The exact language for these basic search parameters can be revised by going to Settings>>> Site administration>>> Language>>> Language customisation.  The location of the language strings for this search block are at block_advsearch.php.

If the user selects Course Name, they can enter text into the Criteria Here field, either the full name of the course or a distinct word or phrase found in the name of the course:

Similarly with Course Category and Summary, the user can type a word or phrase found in a course summary (description) such as “harassment” or in a topic area of courses such as “workplace safety.”

Clicking Go after adding search criteria will display search results on a summary page:

Clicking on any of the course names, which are links, will take the user to the course (if Self Auto Enrolment is enabled) or to the course enrolment page (if Self Enrolment or Token enrolment is enabled).

If no courses are found:

If an administrator has created Refined Custom Course Fields, any that have been set to be searchable will also appear in the drop-down menu for the upper search field, below the standard three course fields:

To check whether a Custom Course Field is searchable, go to Courses>>> Course fields and edit a particular course field; if Yes is selected in the Searchable setting, the course will appear in the search drop-down menu:

Note: a Custom Course field might have a Role Restriction and the user will  be able to search by that course field only if they have the designated role.

Advanced Search

If the user wants to perform a more centralized search, they can click on Advanced in the Advanced Search block:

The user can put search terms in any or all of these fields to make the search very detailed.  Note that the Starts From and To fields must be enabled in order to use them.

The standard search fields in the Advanced Search are:

Key Words, Course Category, Starts From/To (based on course date from the course settings update dialog page)

Show First and Language (the language, if different from the site main language, is also set in the course settings update dialog page).  Keys Words operate in a way similar to the Criteria field in the Advanced Search block: they are any words or phrases found in a course name, such as “Training”; in a course summary (description), such as “harassment”, or in a topic area, such as “workplace safety."

Note: Only Custom Course Fields that are Menu Choices or Multiple Choice will appear on the Advanced Search form.  (See Refined Custom Course Fields for more information on Menu and Multi choice Custom Course Fields.) However, the Advanced Search will not filter courses by these fields unless you select one of their Menu options or one or more Multiple Choice options via the drop-down menus.  If nothing is selected, the Advanced Search function will ignore them.