Search for Issues
In YouTrack, you search for issues with a single search box, using simple query syntax, aided by intelligent query completion.
Search Box
YouTrack provides a single search box to find issues by their attributes and/or with full-text search. That's essentially all you need to search for any issues! No checkboxes, combo boxes, drop-down lists or whatever else usually bloats your screen space when you're trying to filter out existing issues.
To make your search experience even more comfortable, YouTrack provides query completion and highlighting, recent searches, saved searches, and tags.
See Search Queries below for search syntax guidelines.
Search Queries
Search queries consist of keywords and values representing issue attributes (for example, state: fixed to find all fixed issues), and/or full-text search strings.
That is, in query state: unresolved assigned to: Jack Cook context actions
- state and assigned to are keywords representing attributes "State" and "Assignee".
- unresolved and Jack Cook are values of these respective attributes.
- context actions is a full-text search string.
You can also omit unambiguous keywords (for example, #open instead of state: open) and use special shortcut keywords that don't have values by design (for example, #my instead of for: myusername).
When you enter a search query, rely on YouTrack's query completion to make things fast, then press Enter, and grab your search results.
There are special rules concerning attribute search, to distinguish this technique from full-text search:
- Attributes should be followed by a colon:
state: - Attribute values that contain spaces should be surrounded by curly braces:
in: {JetBrains Tracker} - If an attribute value is specified without attributes, it should be preceded by the hash mark:
#unresolved
Note that when you use YouTrack's query completion, curly braces, colons and hash marks are inserted automatically.
Here's a couple of sample queries:
| Sample query | Meaning |
|---|---|
| #my #unresolved | Find all issues either assigned to or reported by me that have not yet been resolved. |
| #submitted #unassigned #feature | Find all feature requests that have been submitted but are not yet assigned to a developer. |
| context action state: open | Find all open issues that contain words "context" and "action". |
See YouTrack keyword reference for full keyword reference with samples.
YouTrack displays recent search queries in its query completion list, and lets you save complex queries.
Query Completion and Highlighting
YouTrack provides query completion in the search box to help you choose appropriate keywords and values. More than that, it inserts symbols such as hash marks, colons and curly braces where required.
Query completion is invoked automatically while you type but you can also display the completion list at will, by pressing Ctrl+Space.
While you're entering a query in the search box, keywords are underlined with grey and values with black. If you've entered an incorrect query, YouTrack uses red dotted underline to highlight errors.
Recent Searches
You don't have to remember queries that you had entered just before your latest coffee break: YouTrack displays your 10 latest queries in the query completion list, along with other suggestions.
If you expect to use a certain query on a regular basis, there's another option — you can save it!
Filters
After executing a search query, YouTrack displays the Filters box to the left of the list of found issues where it shows different attributes and values that these attributes have within the set of found issues.
Take a screenshot to the left as an example. It breaks down current search results by date of update: 15 issues were updated today, 1 yesterday, 827 this month etc.
If you only want to view issues that were updated today or yesterday, select Today and Yesterday. YouTrack will display a hint showing the amount of issues matching your filter. Clicking Show will get you the list of 16 matching issues, and the corresponding query will appear in the search box.
Filters are just an alternative way of clarifying your search — everything that you can do filters, you can do with the search box as well.