Original publication date: August, 2005

iSearch's Profile Testing and Creation Features

Introduced in the October 2003 issue of Softshare Tips, we're happy to report that many of you are taking advantage of iSearch's profile testing and creation features. As these features gain popularity, several questions commonly come up.

Question: Why does a profile sometimes generate more matches on iSearch than my client receives?
Answer: iSearch's profile test feature ignores the exclusion statements that exist in your program's Global file. A typical Global file will contain exclusion statements that prevent sole source bids and bids without exception from matching on a client's profile. Similarly, iSearch's profile test feature does not take into consideration global ignore files that may exist in a profile.

When these exclusion and ignore statements are out of the picture, more matches can result. But even though the exact number of matches shown at iSearch may differ slightly from the numbers received by your client, this feature will still give you an excellent idea of the overall profile performance.

Question: How do I determine the number of matches made by a restrict statement or keyword statement from iSearch's test results?
Answer: This question is best answered with an illustration.

Question: Why are my option statements ignored?
Answer: The option reportonly and the option transport statements will always show a status of ignored in iSearch's test results because these statements carry information regarding how the resulting bid matches should be delivered and tracked. Because you are only testing the profile on iSearch and not actually delivering the output, these statements are of no interest to iSearch.