Help with Queries

The checkbox you see to the left of the field name determines whether or not the value of this item appears in the tabular query results output. In the above examples the name of the defect number and the fault type will appear in the tabular output whereas the telescope name will not.

These are the operands that are available for querying in the fields text entry fields such as the one above for the defect number.

<: Less than.
>: Greater than.
<=: Less than or equal to.
>=: Greater than or equal to.
!=: Not equal to.
=: Equal to. Can be used with wild cards.
~: As = but ignoring case.
==: Exact match (No wild-cards)
*: Wild-card in strings ( A*B will match AB, AxB, AxxxxB, etc. ).
..: A range of values (ex.: 234.56 .. 678.9 ).
|
OR: Will match any of the specified expressions (ex.: =123 OR > 5000 OR < 1 ).

For fields such as the Fault type example above, only one value can be accepted and you are limited to the choices given. For fields such as the telescope example, you are limited to the choices given, but you can highlight as many of the fields as you want. Many of the query items are character fields. These can be queried in a number of ways depending upon how much you are able to narrow the search down yourself. For example, if your initials are IJK and you know that a certain defect was assigned to you, then you can enter the following:

Assigned to

and only faults that are assigned to the "IJK" exactly will be considered. On the other hand, if you know the fault was assigned to someone whose first initial is "I" then the following:

Assigned to

will match the intials "IJK","IXY", etc. Finally, if you know the defect is assigned to someone who has an "I" as one of their initials, (but you don't know which) then

Assigned to

will do the trick.

Specifying dates and range of dates

Dates are specified by YYYYMMDD. If a range is desired, two dates have to be specified separated by two single dots (..). To select all exposures that started between the 1-Jan-1995 and 12-Feb-1995 you could enter:

Date Occurred

Submitting Your Query

To get the result of your query you have to submit it. At the top and at the bottom of the query form you will see a set of buttons like this :

In order to to submit your request press the "Search" button. If you want to reset all the fields back to the way they where before you started entering qualifiers in them, press the "reset" button. (You could try to edit the "Date Occurred" field above and then press the "Reset" button).

Setting up output modes

Tabular Output

Once your search is completed, the matching data are presented in tabular format with special action fields. These action fields are:

The more button.
The update button.

It is worth remembering that the checkboxes that appeared to the left of the query items on the query form are what determine which colums appear in the tabular output. If, for example, you have made a query and you can't find the telescope name on the output table, then go back to the query form and press the telescope checkbox and resubmit the query.

How to limit the number of retrieved records?

Right now, there is a default limit of 100 in number of records one can retrieve from the database. If you are reaching this limit in your query result, it is more than likely that there are other faults that match your query criteria. You can either modify this limit or respecify your query. For internal reasons there is a hardcoded limit setup to 1500 records.

Want more info on each retrieved records?

For each record retrieved from the archive, there is a more link written as M. This allows the user to retrieve all known information concerning this particular entry. This should come up in a second browser.

Want to update the information on the current record?

For each record retrieved from the archive, there is an update link written as U. Clicking on this will bring up a form which allows the user to change some of the existing information about the fault or insert new information. This should come up in a second browser.

Want a printout of the current defect?

For each record retrieved from the archive, there is a print link written as P. Clicking here will bring up a print menu. If you are in the main browser window, this should spawn a second browser session and put the menu on that window. You must indicate whether the output is to go to a file or to a printer. If your choice is to send it to a printer, you must specify which printer from the list you prefer.

You want to use a full screen mode output?.

There is a checkbox on each query form that allows the user to be able to retrieve the information from each archive in full screen mode instead of the default tabular format. This is quite useful when only few records are expected since this mode could generates a tremendous amount of information.

Please report problems or suggestions