Full-Text Search

The SEARCH command performs full-text search across all strings and source code in a Mendix project. It searches element names, documentation, captions, expressions, and other string content.

Syntax

SEARCH '<keyword>';

Examples

-- Search for a keyword
SEARCH 'validation';

-- Search for an entity name
SEARCH 'Customer';

-- Search for error messages
SEARCH 'cannot be empty';

-- Search for specific patterns
SEARCH 'CurrentDateTime';

CLI Usage

# Basic search
mxcli search -p app.mpr "validation"

# Quiet mode (no headers/formatting), suitable for piping
mxcli search -p app.mpr "validation" -q

# Output as names (type<TAB>name per line)
mxcli search -p app.mpr "validation" -q --format names

# Output as JSON array
mxcli search -p app.mpr "validation" --json

Output Formats

--json is the same flag every query command takes (refs, callers, callees, impact, context, show, describe, -c "select …"). With it, stdout carries the JSON document and nothing else — connection and catalog progress go to stderr, an empty result is [], and an error is a message on stderr with a non-zero exit. --format json is still accepted as a deprecated spelling of --json.

The -q (quiet) flag suppresses headers and formatting, making output suitable for piping to other commands.

Piping Search Results

Search results can be piped to other mxcli commands for powerful workflows:

# Find the first microflow matching "error" and describe it
mxcli search -p app.mpr "error" -q --format names | head -1 | awk '{print $2}' | \
  xargs mxcli describe -p app.mpr microflow

What Gets Searched

The search command looks through:

• Element names (entities, microflows, pages, etc.)
• Documentation comments
• Attribute names and captions
• Expression strings in microflows
• Widget captions and labels
• Enumeration value captions
• Log message strings
• Validation feedback messages

Comparison with Catalog Queries

SEARCH provides quick keyword-based search, while catalog queries (SELECT FROM CATALOG.*) provide structured SQL-based queries with filtering, joining, and aggregation. Use SEARCH for quick discovery and catalog queries for precise analysis.

-- Quick search: find anything mentioning "Customer"
SEARCH 'Customer';

-- Precise query: find entities named Customer with their module
SELECT Name, ModuleName FROM CATALOG.ENTITIES WHERE Name LIKE '%Customer%';