Open This lets you open any catalog that is not currently open. It will then appear as the active catalog in the left-hand pane.
Close This closes any catalog that is currently open.
Search Selecting this menu item will allow you to find nodes that fulfil the search criterion. When it is selected, the search wizard will guide you through the necessary steps. Step 1 asks you to choose the node type: item, group or category. Step 2 asks you to select the pages which contain the attributes you want to use to build the search criterion. Step 3 asks you to choose the attributes and step 4 to build the search criterion. For example, say you are using AddressBook and wish to search for all the nodes where the surname equals Smith. The node type in this search would be item, the page would be Identity, the attribute would be Last name and the search criterion would be Last Name equals Smith.
Index Indexing allows you to access the information in a catalog in a variety of different ways. A hotel owner might hold details of bookings by name of customer and date booked in. For some purposes, such as book-keeping, he may prefer to access those records according to invoice number, and so he can create an index for all bookings accessed by invoice number. At a later date he may decide to try and analyse what age groups his customers fall in to, and whereabouts in the country they come from for bookings for the current year. He can set up two indexes for the category that holds current bookings, one indexing by age range, another by name of county. Once an index or indexes are created for a category, any new items added into that category will automatically be added to the index.
A category or categories are indexed on a chosen attribute, which may be an attribute of an item or an attribute of a group. Each index will be represented as a group, within which the original entries are grouped according to the type of index selected. In the above example, holding age ranges of customers, one group, called age1-16, might hold all customers aged under 17, while other groups may be age17-30, age30-49 and age50plus, depending on what the owner is trying to find out. In the example of using invoice numbers, each separate entry in the bookings catalog will have its own group in the index, named by its invoice number. You might decide to index all entries in the Personal category of your addressBook alphabetically by first name. Under the category Personal, an index group called 'entry by Identity::firstName' will be created.
The indexing wizard will take you through five steps. In step 1, you are asked to select the node type to index, choosing between groups or individual items. You can only tick groups if the catalog contains any groups and they have any attributes attached to them. Step 2 asks you to select the attribute on which to index. Attribute names are in the format Page::Attribute. For example, in JEANaddressBook there is an attribute Identity::lastName. Step 3 offers you four ways to create the index: on each distinct value; specific way points; alphabetical and user-defined. Distinct values would be used in the example of the invoice numbers, specific way points in the example of the age ranges and alphabetical in the example of first names in the addressBook. The option to create a user-defined index is part of the SDK; see the section on Extending JEAN. If you have chosen to index using specific way points, step 4 will ask you to specify range details. In the example of age ranges, the name of the first range is age1-16. Assuming that the values are held as age in years and months, the lower value you wish to be included is 1 year 0 months old, and the upper value is 17 years 0 months. By ticking the checkbox to include the lower bound and not the upper bound, you are catching everyone from age 1 year 0 months to 16 years and 11 months but excluding those who have turned 17.
If you index using a set attribute, then before choosing the index type, you will need to give the set element name and type. For example, in multimedia, the attribute artists is a set type with possible elements composer, soloist and orchestra. So the set element name you are interested in indexing on may be composer and the set element type would then be string.
Step 5 asks you to select categories to index. Note that the index can be created over any number of categories.
Unindex If you no longer need an index, the unindex option will delete it and will stop the process of automatically adding entries to the index when a new item is created in the original category. It is important not simply to delete the index group.
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