Instant Search in CDT

Searching for ingredients to add to a composition

When you are in the CDT (Composition Design Tool) adding a composition to a formulation or raw material, you type the code or the name of an ingredient into the item code field and the system instantly searches and returns potential matches for you to select from.

The default instant search looks for matches to item code and item name and includes formulations and raw materials.

If this search does not show the ingredient you need, towards the bottom of the search results change the option to select ‘deep search’ to perform a more extensive search which considers CAS, EC number, Short name, Alternative code, Chemical name, Common names, Cross Reference codes and other synonyms.

You can additionally change the search to show only formulations or only raw materials.

Background

When someone is adding a formulation on a system which has a very large number of ingredients and formulations, the deep search can take 1 or 2 seconds to return matching results on ingredients. This is due to the search looking across multiple fields including CAS, EINECS, Chemical names, Synonyms etc. Historically ‘deep search’ was the default instant search, in order to return the most potential results. However, most of the time users know the actual name or code of the ingredient they want to use, and speed to find it is more critical than returning the maximum number of results.