Searching your tables and questions

Adding filters to your questions can make searching text in your questions a breeze. You can follow along with the examples in this article using the Sample Database included with each Metabase installation.

Search within a question

We’ll start by clicking the Browse Data button, selecting Sample Database, and opening the Products table.

To search within questions, we use a customizable filter. We’ll click the Filter button and select the column we want to filter by.

Let’s select Title. Then use the dropdown menu that currently says Is. A popup with the text filter options will appear to offer us:

• Is
• Is not
• Contains
• Does not contain
• Is empty
• Not empty
• Starts with
• Ends with

We’ll select Starts with and type “rustic” in the search box on the Filter sidebar. As we’re typing “rustic”, a dropdown will give us a preview of our search results. We’ll click Add Filter to add the filter to our question.

With the filter applied, our question will only list product titles that start with “rustic”.

Update your search filter

Now that we’ve added a filter, our search filter is at the top of our table. We can click on the filter description, which says Title starts with rustic.

In the popup, we can use the text box to replace the current search term, for example with “Marble.” We can also change how the widget filters the results by clicking the dropdown menu that currently says Starts with, for example by changing our text filter options to contains. We update our search widget from Title starts with rustic to Title contains Marble, and make the search case sensitive.

Advanced search with Custom Expressions

Custom expressions are a way to make advanced queries with numbers or text. Let’s say we want to filter results by products that contain either “Rustic” or “Clock” in their title. Let’s create a custom expression by clicking the Filter button and selecting Custom Expression at the bottom of the sidebar. If we start typing, we’ll see suggestions pop up that we can use in our custom expression.

The Custom Expression sidebar contains tools to create advanced filters or add custom columns to a question. Let’s use out the “contains” function.

We’ll write our base query like so: (contains([Title] , "Rustic")).

• [Title] is the column to filter
• "Rustic" is the term to filter for

We’ll add a space and type OR, then we’ll write another text search function: OR contains([Title] , "clock"), and click Done.

Searching on foreign keys

We can use foreign keys to search a table based on data from a connected table. To be able to search on foreign keys with strings as well as ID numbers, admins will need to change the data model settings settings. From the main Metabase navigation bar, click on the gears icon to open up the Admin Panel, click on the Data Model tab, and select Sample Database. Next, click on the Reviews table and click on the gears icon next to the Product_ID field.

In our example, the Product_ID column is set up as a foreign key, with search box filter settings, and a display value of Title. This way when we filter on the Product_ID we can filter by title instead of ID number, and the table will display the title of each product instead of its ID number.

You can learn more about editing metadata in our documentation.

With our metadata set, we’ll return to the home page, click the Browse Data button, select Sample Database, and open the Reviews table. We’ll add a search widget by clicking the Filter button and selecting Product ID in the Filter sidebar. In our new filter widget, we’ll type “Practical”, and select one of the values in the dropdown, like “Practical Bronze Computer”.

Add a search widget to your SQL question

In a normal database, we’d need to craft a new SQL query for every search term, but Metabase makes searching our database easy, even when using SQL queries. All we need to do is insert a variable in the WHERE clause of a query.

In the upper right of the main navigation bar, we’ll click on the pencil icon to write SQL.

SELECT *
FROM REVIEWS
[[WHERE UPPER(Body) LIKE UPPER(CONCAT('%', {{search_term}}, '%'))]]

As soon as we start typing within the curly brackets {{}}, the search bar will appear above the SQL input area Metabase will kick out the variables sidebar.

SQL question breakdown

In plain English, this SQL query says, “Show me reviews where the body of the review includes the search term, whether or not the two are capitalized in the same way.”

Let’s break down the elements in line three:

• [[]] The brackets make the filter optional. If no search term is supplied to the variable, the query will return unfiltered rows.
• WHERE filters the results.
• UPPER() capitalizes both the text being searched and the search term, so they will match even if there is a difference in case.
• BODY is the column to filter.
• LIKE searches for a pattern.
• CONCAT() (short for concatenate) combines strings.
• '%' A percent symbol is a wild card. If positioned before the search term additional text can come before the term. Wrapping the search term with % searches for the term even if it’s surrounded by text.
• {{}} The double curly brackets wrap a variable.
• search_term The variable that the filter widget will supply with text to search for.

Variables sidebar

The variable type has selected Text, but there are several other options as well:

• Number
• Date
• Field filter

Filters can be both complex and insanely useful; check out filter widgets and field filters to get a sense for the many ways they can provide valuable insights.

Below Variable type is Filter widget label, which automatically uses the text we type between the curly brackets as our label.

For additional examples and advice on typing SQL queries that support a search widget, click the Help tab towards the top of the sidebar.