Viewing and Manipulating your data

Use Alt V (or click the View/Find button) to carry out searches. Stock and Contact searches can be carried out using compact or full versions of the search screens. You can set the default search mode for these using the Options buttons on the corresponding search form.

The Compact search interface is typically in Point Of Sale mode. The Full search is typically used in maintenance and direct marketing/catalogue mode.

The recommended method for finding, displaying and manipulating all your Stock, Contact, Appointments and email data is to generate Views which are displayed on the corresponding form. The application provides a powerful, intuitive Query by Form interface to accomplish this. Every search results in a View of candidates being displayed to you in a summary form. 99.9% of the time you should be looking at views of your data, not the entire record base. Views are groups of records that conform to criteria you enter in Query by Form fashion(see finding Records). Examples are views of all items with titles starting with Gre having the word workplace somewhere in the description field, or all Contacts of type Dealer, all books with the word Niagara anywhere in the description field, etc, etc. You can combine criteria from any fields to limit the search.

Note: If you wish to you may use the browse keys (PgUp and PgDn) to navigate between records to find specific records. However it is recommended that you create a view first and then browse.

The views generated in Stock can be added to catalogues. Views of Contacts can be used to specify multiple recipients for offers or emails. To exploit this data management system to its full potential it is highly recommend that you familiarize yourself with the concept of views.

When a view is displayed the number of records reported is the number in the view. As you scroll through a view you will notice the number in the record selector changing, indicating the position of the current record relative to the first, e.g. 7 of 10. If you do another search which returns 78 records the record selector will show 1 of 78. These numbers are transient and are in no way to be confused with the unique ID numbers which are used to track records from session to session, and across the entire database. These only indicate the number of records in the current view and their relative position within the view. To set up a view of all records in the database being displayed use the All command button (Alt^A).