No MDX, Essbase or ASO internals in the post (you may be relieved to read).
Instead, I want to highlight a very simple but wonderful feature of the Firefox browser – using Smart Keywords (aka ‘Smart Bookmarks‘) to perform custom searches. In brief, ‘Smart Keywords’ allow you to associate the search function of a web page with a text keyword.
If you’re already familiar – as many ‘tech’ types will be – you can stop reading now. If you aren’t, I think you’ll be very pleasantly surprised by how easy this makes accessing your go-to EPM online resources.
For example, I have associated the keyword ‘tr’ with the search box in the 11.1.2.3 Essbase Technical Reference. Now I can open a new tab in Firefox, and enter the following:
Hitting return takes me immediately to the following page, just as if I had navigated to the Technical Reference, entered “alter session”, and then clicked “Search”:
Even better, I have Smart Keywords configured for the Database Administrator’s Guide (dbag), the Network54 Essbase board (n54), and the entire ‘Business Intelligence’ space at OTN (otn). I can get straight in to search results at all of those places, direct from the address bar.
Mozilla explain how to set Smart Keywords up here.
One warning – the method described at the link above doesn’t quite work for OTN. It produces a bookmark that looks like this:
https://community.oracle.com/search.jspa?facet=content&type=discussion&q=test&sort=relevanceDesc&place=%2Fplaces%2F1430&customTheme=?j-search-input=%s
I manually edited the bookmark to look like this…
https://community.oracle.com/search.jspa?q=%s&place=%2Fplaces%2F1062&depth=ALL
…and all was well. The ‘place’ and ‘places’ parameter values in my URL would need to be modified to create a search restricted to different OTN spaces. An easy way to do that would be to run a search manually against your selected space(s) and then inspect the URL.
Update July 9th 2015
It occurred to me that the built-in search for the Oracle documentation is not particularly flexible compared to, say, Google or DuckDuckGo. The Google “site:” modifier can accept a URL, so it’s possible to use Google to search just the (for example) 11.1.2.4 Technical Reference with the following Smart Keyword bookmark:
https://encrypted.google.com/search?q=%s+site:docs.oracle.com/cd/E57185_01/epm.1112/essbase_tech_ref/
Compare the output of the following searches – I know which one I prefer (not to mention the ability to use other Google modifiers, quoting, logical operators etc):
Tim
Found out how to do this in Chrome.
You can add a new search engine. The urls are bit different for Chrome
TechRef
For any words
https://docs.oracle.com/cd/E40248_01/epm.1112/essbase_tech_ref/search/srchrslt.htm?searchField=%s&srcriteria=any
Extact Phrease
https://docs.oracle.com/cd/E40248_01/epm.1112/essbase_tech_ref/search/srchrslt.htm?searchField=%s&srcriteria=phrase
All Words
https://docs.oracle.com/cd/E40248_01/epm.1112/essbase_tech_ref/search/srchrslt.htm?searchField=%s&srcriteria=all
OTN uses the same url.