[SalesForce] How to search on object lookup on custom field

Listing out all the potential lookup values isn't currently possible, although it would be reelly nice. Users consistently expect this behavior and get confused why the record they're looking for isn't in the list. It doesn't help that the wildcard search can be a little difficult to get used to.

As you may already be aware you can change which fields show up in the lookup dialog by editing the "Lookup Dialog" search layout for the object, but as noted on that page this doesn't affect which fields are searched by the global search, beyond the name / all fields checkboxes.

Also, as you may be aware you can alter which fields are available for filter results, but again, those aren't available for searching, just for filtering the results from the search.

Finally, the closest you can get to all is using a two letter search with wildcards on both sides, e.g. Bo, but as far as I know that's the best you can do.

The implementation of Search, Lookup Filters and unseelctive search terms was the root cause. This is the answer we got from Support:

An entity-specific search (e.g. Case, Account, Custom Object) will return at most 250 results. Lookup Filters will then only apply to the top 200 search results. This filtering is performed post-query as it relies on information present in the database but not in the search index. As a result of this, if the desired result does not appear within the top 200 search results, it will not appear in the Filtered Lookup list. This means that the combination of a high-hit-count search (e.g. a search for “Sales*” that returns a thousand results) and a Lookup Filter can cause many “expected” results which are retrievable through more restrictive queries to not show up when using the Lookup search.

Suppose in your org has over 10,000 records that start with the word "Spanish". A search for "sp" returns a max of 250 records and then the Lookup Filters evaluate those results according to the filter criteria. If the 250 records returned in the initial query do not meet the criteria of the Lookup Filters, the lookup search will return 0 results and make it appear as though it is not working as expected even though it is.

Workaround: Either remove the Lookup Filters, make the Lookup Filters less restrictive or use more restrictive search terms.

This is also documented in this Knowledge Article.

That was exactely our case. In a specific customer org (not in any of our dev orgs) we have thousands Period__c records with a text Year field of value "2020".

Period__c records are tied to the Contract__c by using a Lookup filter.

If non of the first 200 returned Period__c records "belongs" to the current Contract__c parent record We get ZERO results.

We think this implementation is absolutely suboptimal and strongly reduces the use cases for Enhanced Lookups. Maybe we or someone else will create an IdeaExchange for that.