Constructing CCL query

Find information related to Common Command Language (CCL)

Common Command Language - CCL (ISO 8777) provides a symbolic language for expressing boolean query structures. The rules for creating a query are unambiguous and one can create complex queries as easily as the more trivial ones.

A query consists of a qualifier and a value separated by an equal sign. Many expressions can be combined with logical operators. There are three logical operators: "and", "or", and "not". If the value being searched consists of more than one word then it could be split and combined with the "and" operator, or surrounded by double quotes (") to preserve the spaces between the words.

Supported CCL qualifiers

The following, are commonly used CCL qualifiers. If there is a need to search additional indexes in a catalog, then other qualifiers can be added.

Note:

For consistent results, the search index corresponding to any new qualifier must be supported in all catalogs being searched as part of a federated search.

CCL Qualifier	Z39.50 Catalog Serch Index (common bib-1 use attribute)
au	Author (1 = 1003)
isbn	ISBN (1 = 7)
issn	ISSN (1 = 8)
su	Subject (1 = 21)
term	Term (1 = 1016)
title	Title (1 = 4)

Examples of valid CCL queries

Author query
- au="Albert Camus"
ISBN query
- isbn=9781416548898
Title query
- ti="Gone with the Wind"
Term query
- term="Myth" or term="Sisyphus"
Title and author query:
- ti="Gone with the Wind" and au="Mitchell" and au="Margaret"
- ti="Don Quixote" and au="Migue De Cervantes" or au="Edith Grossman"

URL encoding

The CCL query (query parameter value) must be percent-encoded when calling any DiscoveryItem services.