SOQL and SOSL Reference

Introduction to SOQL and SOSL
Salesforce Object Query Language (SOQL)
Salesforce Object Search Language (SOSL)
Typographical Conventions in This Document
SOSL Limits on Search Results
SOSL Limits on External Object Search Results
SOSL Syntax
Example Text Searches
convertCurrency()
FIND {SearchQuery}
FORMAT()
IN SearchGroup
LIMIT n
OFFSET n
ORDER BY Clause
RETURNING FieldSpec
toLabel(fields)
Update an Article’s Keyword Tracking with SOSL
Update an Article’s Viewstat with SOSL
USING Listview=
WHERE conditionExpression
WITH DATA CATEGORY DataCategorySpec
WITH DivisionFilter
WITH HIGHLIGHT
WITH METADATA
WITH NETWORK NetworkIdSpec
WITH PricebookId
WITH SNIPPET
WITH SPELL_CORRECTION
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Salesforce Object Search Language (SOSL)

Use the Salesforce Object Search Language (SOSL) to construct text-based search queries against the search index.

When building efficient SOSL queries, create filters that are selective. By default, SOSL queries scan all entities. The search engine looks for matches to the search term across a maximum of 2,000 records. Sharing is applied after the result set is returned from the search stack. If your filters are not selective and cause search term matches of more than 2000 records, there is a possibility of running into search crowding.

You can search text, email, and phone fields for multiple objects, including custom objects, that you have access to in a single query in the following environments.

  • SOAP or REST calls
  • Apex statements
  • Visualforce controllers and getter methods
  • Schema Explorer of the Eclipse Toolkit

If your org has relationship queries enabled, SOSL supports SOQL relationship queries.

Note

When to Use SOSL

Use SOSL when you don’t know which object or field the data resides in, and you want to:
  • Retrieve data for a specific term that you know exists within a field. Because SOSL can tokenize multiple terms within a field and build a search index from this, SOSL searches are faster and can return more relevant results.
  • Retrieve multiple objects and fields efficiently where the objects might or might not be related to one another.
  • Retrieve data for a particular division in an organization using the divisions feature.
  • Retrieve data that’s in Chinese, Japanese, Korean, or Thai. Morphological tokenization for CJKT terms helps ensure accurate results.

Performance Considerations

If your searches are too general, they are slow and return too many results. Use the following clauses to define efficient text searches.

  • IN: Limits the types of fields to search, including email, name, or phone.
  • LIMIT: Specifies the maximum number of rows to return.
  • OFFSET: Displays the search results on multiple pages.
  • RETURNING: Limits the objects and fields to return.
  • WITH DATA CATEGORY: Specifies the data categories to return.
  • WITH DivisionFilter: Specifies the division field to return.
  • WITH NETWORK: Specifies the Experience Cloud site ID to return.
  • WITH PricebookId: Specifies the price book ID to return.

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