Searching for users

Super-users that are already logged in may search for other users under a variety of criteria. For each field, one string can be provided as a search parameter (i.e. it is not full-text search).

Available search criteria are:

• User ID
• Username
• Email address (if not encrypted in the database)
• Signup status
• Approval status
• Name fields:
  • Display name
  • First name
  • Middle name
  • Last name

If no criteria are specified, all users are returned, in batches of 50.

Search details:

• Email and display/first/middle/last name fields are case-insensitive
• Email, username and user ID and status fields are considered exact values to be looked up
• Name fields can be AND or OR-joined and the other parameters are additionally AND-joined with them
• Name fields can be interpreter as either exact values or sub-strings to look up
• If any of username or user ID is given on input, all the remaining parameters are ignored - this is because these two fields are always unique in the database so any other field will have no impact on the query
• If both username and user ID are given on input, only user ID will be used and username will be ignored
• A batch size with a maximum of 100 results per page can be specified
• On response, a list of results is returned, even if it is empty or possible with one matching element only
• Metadata returned in response lets one find out how many users matched input, how many pages there are in total and if there is a previous/next page available to navigate to

Defaults:

• Minimum search string length: 2 characters
• Batch size: 50
• Order by: display name, username, signup time, user ID - all ascending

Details of OR and AND joins:

• If more than one of display/first/middle/last name is given on input, they will be AND or OR-joined, depending on input configuration. By default AND is used.

  For instance, looking up John in first name and Smith in last name will find all users that have first name containing John and last name containing Smith, i.e. all John Smiths but it may be also told to return all persons that have either first name John or last name Smith if OR is the join parameter.

• Email, username, user ID and all status fields are looked up by an exact match, i.e. looking up "smith@example.com" by email will find all users whose email is 'smith@example.com' but will not find 'john.smith@example.com'

Email encryption:

• By default all email addresses are encrypted - it is not possible to use them as search criteria and warning code E009001 will be returned in such a case