Clean up Searchable fields - best practices

Question

Hello,I would like to clean up my searchable fields, assuming this will improve QBASE&nbsp; performance.&nbsp; Any suggestions on what field types definitely don't need to be searchable?thx------------------------------BuildPro------------------------------

evanmartinez · Answer

Hi BuildPro,One field type that can be very intensive is Multi-line text blocks. If you have sections where users might be entering paragraphs of text removing them from search can help avoid situations where people look for text strings against big blocks of text if that is not your intention. The same is true for any formula or relationship fields you have in your app that someone wouldn't want to search against. For example if you are using formula fields in the background for calculations that wouldn't need to be searched on reports or if you are using fields to style text you usually don't want to include both fields in a search as that is duplicative.------------------------------Evan Martinez------------------------------

buildpro · Answer

Is there a way to "uncheck all"?&nbsp; I have 2500+ fields in my Jobs Table.&nbsp; Very tedious to uncheck one-by-one.Thank you------------------------------BuildPro------------------------------

markshnier__you · Answer

I do not think there is a way to uncheck all. What I would do is go through each of those tables with very high field counts and set up the default report meaning the columns that are most useful most of the time. And then I would one by one go through just each of those fields to decide which ones are searchable.

When you are searching on a table report which is the most common kind of report QuickBase will only search the fields that are on the report so arguably for performance it's not super necessary to uncheck searchable on every single field but rather unchecked searchable on fields which are commonly used on table reports.

Of course if you have set up search icons on the dashboard then you might be searching against all the fields unless you limit the search icon to only search on a particular report.

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Mark Shnier (YQC)
mark.shnier@gmail.com
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danieljohnson2 · Answer

I'm late to the conversation here (was looking for a discussion on whether making lookup fields searchable or not has an impact on performance) but you can do this with the the Quickbase API and pipelines. I am once again shouting out Scott Galloway and his Empower session from last year (https://youtu.be/6gAHfV0PDWk) in this solution. You would have one pipeline call another pipeline, and that second pipeline would loop on itself calling this endpoint, https://api.quickbase.com/v1/fields/{fieldId}?tableId={tableId} first to see if the field exists, and if it does then you would call this endpoint, https://api.quickbase.com/v1/fields/{fieldId}?tableId={tableId} and in the payload have "findEnabled": false. Whether the field exists or not you would loop the pipeline back on itself adding 1 to the field ID each time. Scott's video describes how you can make sure to limit the number of runs that occur only to the number of fields you have based off the field ID number.------------------------------Daniel Johnson------------------------------

danieljohnson2 · Answer

https://developer.quickbase.com/operation/updateField------------------------------Daniel Johnson------------------------------

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Clean up Searchable fields - best practices

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