Advanced contact search

Pour :Administrateur

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View of the 'advanced search' page

Advanced search is your main segmentation tool. It lets you filter your base on dozens of simultaneous criteria, view results in real time, then trigger group actions (campaign, categorization, visit route, export). It replaces the old simple search page with a much more powerful interface.

Access it from the Contacts menu → Advanced search, or directly via the URL /app/contact/search.

The screen at a glance

The interface is divided into three zones:

• At the top: a full-text search field (name, first name, email, phone, address).
• On the left: the advanced filter panel (sticky during scroll) with its nine sections.
• On the right: the results table with pagination, sorting, selection, and the group action bar.

At the top of the screen, two buttons manage the saved searches: Save (create a reusable search) and My searches (load a saved search).

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Automatic update

As soon as you modify a filter or type in the text field, the results refresh automatically after a short delay. No need to click on a "Search" button.

Full-text search

The field at the top accepts several words separated by spaces. Each word is considered a token that must be found in at least one of the contact's main fields: last name, first name, email, phone, address.

Examples:

Search	Behavior
cohen	All contacts whose field contains "cohen"
cohen paris	Contacts whose fields contain both "cohen" and "paris"
+33 6 12	Contacts whose phone starts with this pattern

The search is insensitive to case and accents: typing elie will also find "Élie" or "Éliyahou".

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Text search + filters: the winning combination

The text field adds to the advanced filters. You can for example filter "all archived contacts from Marseille" via the panel, then type mizrahi to keep only those whose name contains this pattern.

The nine filter sections

The filter panel groups the criteria in nine sections to remain readable. Click on a section to expand its filters.

Section	What you find
Identity	Gender, start of name, contained first names, date of birth, age
Categories & relations	Applied categories, family links, number of parents/children
Contact details	Email/phone contains, presence of email, phone, address, date of birth, number of emails/phones/addresses
Geography	Country, city, postal code, address, phone area code
Contact statuses	New, deceased, archived
Documents & commitments	Presence of documents, custom fields, active chlihouts (rituals)
System activity	Creation date, last modification date
Custom fields	All your tailor-made fields created (Text, Number, Boolean, Date)
Financial activity	Total paid, number of payments, period, methods used, active subscription, ongoing pledge

The detail of each filter, its modes (Include, Exclude, Equal) and its expected formats are described in the dedicated page: Filter catalog.

Understanding the Include / Exclude / Equal modes

Some multi-value filters (Categories, Family links, First name, Email contains…) offer a mode selector:

• Include (default) — the contact matches if they have at least one of the chosen values.
• Exclude — the contact matches if they have none of the chosen values.
• Equal — the contact matches if they have exactly all the chosen values (and no more, no less).

Example: if you filter the category on #FIDELE, #NEWSLETTER:

• Include → contacts who have at least one of these two categories.
• Exclude → contacts who have neither #FIDELE nor #NEWSLETTER.
• Equal → contacts who have exactly these two categories (and no others).

The results

The right-hand table displays the filtered contacts with, for each row:

• The title icon, the full name (clickable, opens the profile).
• The primary email, the primary phone, the primary address.
• Up to 3 categories displayed as tags; beyond, a "+N" counter displays with the full list on hover.

If you added a financial filter (total paid, analysis period, …), an additional column Total donation appears with the cumulative amount and the number of corresponding payments.

Sort and paginate

The table supports sorting by name (Contact column). The default pagination is 50 contacts per page, with 25 / 100 / 200 options. The total of results is displayed at the bottom of the table.

Selection and group actions

Check the contacts row by row, or use the header box to select the entire page. Once at least one contact is checked, the group action bar at the top of the table becomes active.

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Select all filtered results

If your filters return more contacts than a single page, a banner appears with the Select all N filtered results button. This button loads the entire selection server-side — the actions will then carry on the totality, not just the visible page.

Available actions

Once the selection is defined, three actions are offered:

Action	Effect
Create a message campaign	Opens the campaign editor pre-filled with the list of recipients (SMS, email, push…). For contacts who have registered parents, it's the parents who are added as recipients; otherwise the contact themselves.
Add categories	Applies one or more categories (tags) to all selected contacts in a single operation.
Add to a route	Opens the route (GPS tour) attribution modal. Ideal for preparing the visit of several families in a neighborhood.

Export to Excel

The Export Excel button generates a CSV file in Excel format (UTF-8 BOM, compatible with Excel and Numbers) with the columns:

• Last name, First name, Email, Phone
• Address, Postal code, City, Country
• If a financial filter is active: Total donation (€), Number of donations

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The whole page is not all the result

If you check the header box (which selects the current page) and the total results exceeds the page, the export automatically switches to exporting all filtered results. This is deliberate: it avoids the classic error "I thought I had exported everything, I only got the first page".

Save and reload a search

When you have built a useful filter combination (for example "Parisian donors 2025"), click on Save at the top right. Give it a name and choose visibility:

• Personal — visible only by you.
• Shared — visible by all users of your organization. Handy to prepare segments reused by the whole team.

Saved searches reload in one click from the My searches button. See the dedicated page: Saved searches.

Modified search indicator

After loading a saved search, its name displays to the left of the top banner. If you modify a filter, a modified badge appears and an Update button is offered (reserved to the owner). This avoids accidentally overwriting a search shared by a colleague.

Performance

The advanced search relies on an optimized MongoDB aggregation pipeline with a French collation (insensitive to case and accents). For large bases:

• Sorting and pagination are delegated to the server.
• The "Select all filtered results" action loads only the necessary identifiers (not all the data).
• The export uses the same data as displayed (no second redundant API call).

On bases exceeding several tens of thousands of contacts, expect a delay of one to two seconds after each filter change.

Going further

• Detailed filter catalog — the exhaustive list of available criteria and their format.
• Saved searches — management, sharing, organization.
• Tricky points to know — subtle behaviors related to search, duplicates, case, etc.