Are Lookups appropriate here?

[marquiselee]

I work with a bunch of media companies and on monthly basis licensing for the content they provide changes. So this week I may have rights to display the BRANDS 'NBC' 'HBO' and 'CNN' video content on mobile devices but next week that list may look like 'CBS' NBC' 'AMC' and 'ABC'.

Right now I have many searches that look like this but with nearly 100 brands...

search AND (BRAND="HBO" OR BRAND="CBS" OR BRAND="SHOWTIME") | Table ...

Obviously I'd rather not change each search every time licensing agreements change. I've created a csv listing each of the Brands I have licensing for and added it as a lookup table. that looks like this.

TYPE, VALUE
Brand,HBO
Brand,CBS
Brand,SHOWTIME
Brand,NBC
etc...

Is this a proper use for lookups and how do I implement this in my searches?

[alacercogitatus · Accepted solution]

If you place that csv file in the $APP_HOME/lookups (as Brands.csv), you can then combine that with this:

search [ |inputlookup Brands.csv|rename VALUE as Brand|table Brand|format "(" "" "" "" "OR" ")" ]| Table...

[marquiselee]

thanks much! I got it working eventually... I had to reformat my csv and remove the 'table Brand' from the subsearch. woot!

[alacercogitatus]

This should return the contents of your CSV: |inputlookup Brands.csv|rename VALUE as Brand|table Brand|format "(" "" "" "" "OR" ")".

[marquiselee]

hmmm... i must be doing something wrong. I'm not sure it's accessing Brands.csv should a simple search of inputlookup Brands.csv return something?