Styjun

I have an issue with the search parameters. I want to pass a phrase in my query. For exemple i'm looking for emails where the subject is "Test 1".
For this i'm doing a get on this ressource.

https://graph.microsoft.com/v1.0/me/messages?$search="subject:Test 1"

But the behaviour of this query is : Looking for mails that contains "Test" in the subject OR 1 in any other fields.
Refering to the KQL Syntax

A phrase (includes two or more words together, separated by spaces; however, the words must be enclosed in double quotation marks)

So, to do what i want i have to put double quotes (") around my phrase to do a strict value search. Like below

subject:"Test 1"

The problem it's at this point. Microsoft graph api already use double quotes (") after the parameters $search.

?$search="Key words"

So I can't do what is mentioned in the KQL doc.

https://graph.microsoft.com/v1.0/me/messages?$search="subject:"Test 1""

It's throwing an error :

"Syntax error: character '1' is not valid at position 15 in '"subject:"test 1""'.",

It's an expected behaviour. I was pretty sure it will not work.

If someone has any suggestions for a solution or a workaround, I'm a buyer.

What I've already tried so far :

• Use simple quote


• Remove the quotes right after $select=


• Remove the subject part $select="Test 1", same behaviour as the first request mentioned in this post. It will looks for emails that contain "test" or "1".

Best regards.

EDIT :
After sasfrog's anwser :
I used $filter : It works well with simple operator AND, OR.I have some errors by using the Not Operator. And btw you have to use the orderby parameter to show the result by date and add the field in filter parameters.

Exemple 1 (working, what I asked for first) :

https://graph.microsoft.com/v1.0/me/messages/?$orderby=receivedDateTime desc &$filter=receivedDateTime ge 1900-01-01T00:00:00Z AND contains(subject,'test 1')

Exemple 2 (not working)

https://graph.microsoft.com/v1.0/me/messages/?$orderby=receivedDateTime desc &$filter=(receivedDateTime ge 1900-01-01T00:00:00Z AND contains(subject,'test 1')) NOT(contains(from/EmailAddress/address,[specific address]))

EDIT 2
After some test with the filter parameters.
The NOT operator is still not working so to workaround use "ne" (non-equals)
the example 2 becomes :

 https://graph.microsoft.com/v1.0/me/messages/?$orderby=receivedDateTime desc&$filter=(receivedDateTime ge 1900-01-01T00:00:00Z AND contains(subject,'test 1')) AND (from/EmailAddress/address ne [specific address])

UPDATE : OTHER SOLUTION WITH $search

Using $filter is great but it looks like it was sometimes pretty slow. So I found a workaround aboutmy issue.
It's to use AND operator between all terms.

Exemple 4 :
I'm looking for the mails where the subject is test 1;
Let value = "test 1". So you have to splice it by using space separator. And after write some code to manipulate this array, to obtain something like below.

$search="(subject:test AND subject:1)"

The brackets can be important if you use a multiple fields search. And Voilà.

Not sure if it's sufficient for what you're doing, but how about using the contains function within a filter query instead:

https://graph.microsoft.com/v1.0/me/messages?$filter=contains(subject,'Test 1')

Sounds like you're already looking at the doco but here it is just in case.

Update also, this worked for me using the search method:

https://graph.microsoft.com/v1.0/me/messages?$search="subject:'Test 1'"