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Attempting to confirm that Salesforce does not have native support to query contacts and accounts limiting the results by a combination of the following: FirstName, LastName, City, State.

Reason I ask is that it appears the native search supports running a search "everything, everywhere" that then maybe limited to contacts, accounts, opportunities, etc. - and a custom filter maybe setup to enable sub-searching by FirstName, LastName, City, State. Issue is that the results are sub-searching the "everything, everywhere" results, not searching only by those fields; which in my experience is useful, but very confusing to someone that does not know what is going on, or doesn't not want this feature on in a given instance.

Does Salesforce have native support to query contacts and accounts limiting the results by a combination of the following: FirstName, LastName, City, State - and if so, how do I implement this?

  • Using the enterprise edition of Salesforce with the Non-Profit Start Pack.
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I assume you are asking about the search that appears in the header that if usually referred to as global search? This does allow some search options but they are not the sort of options you are looking for. The design is intentionally general and the documentation such as How Global Search Works suggests it optimises according to what a user does. I think it might be wrong to assume that its results will be confusing up front; we have not experienced complaints from customers (and presumably Salesforce did some usability checking before introducing the feature). Overall it is a bit more like a Google search than a traditional database search but that is not a bad thing for most users.

When a "lookup" field is to be populated (a reference to another object) there are a number of options available.

Within your own Visualforce pages and controllers you could construct whatever search design you like within them, but obviously that only applies if your users always only use your pages.

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  • I'd appreciate an explanation why this was downvoted.
    – Keith C
    May 17, 2014 at 8:59
  • Believe you mean you'd like an explanation of why your answer was not useful. Reasons include: (1) I've done user testing on the global search function, and it's an issue; unless you've got data to support your claim, I strongly dislike people expressing opinions as if they were based on facts. (2) Salesforce global search is nothing like Google's Web search results, since no context is provide in the results.
    – blunders
    May 17, 2014 at 11:19
  • (3) Lookup fields having nothing to do with the question; meaning search is a read-only function, and at no point do I reference users needing to add/edit records. (4) Reference to Visualforce pages is off-topic, though semi-related, but given it reads as "Try Visualforce pages" is of no use.
    – blunders
    May 17, 2014 at 11:21
  • @blunders Thanks - appreciate you taking the time to comment.
    – Keith C
    May 17, 2014 at 11:33
  • No problem, hope it was of use, and thanks for asking too.
    – blunders
    May 17, 2014 at 11:35

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