Searching the Database

Once a database is loaded, the top part of your publication window will show a scrollable table view, together with a search field and a month and year search qualifier, as shown in Figure 1 below:

search
Figure 1 - Search Group

The table view in Figure 1 shows the database from the 1975-1979 QST View CD-ROM . The seven columns show the title of the article, the QST department it appeared in, the first and last name and callsign of the author and the year and month the article appeared in.

You can use the table view's vertical scroller to manually search through the database, but as we will show, there are quicker ways to search.


Using the Search Field

Notice the familiar Mac OS X search field in the form of a rounded rectangle with a small magnifying glass icon in Figure 1. As you type text into this search field, QST Browser will immediately narrow down the articles that appear in the table view.

Figure 2 shows the table view when "WA1" is entered into the search field:

WA1search
Figure 2- Search narrowed to "WA1"

You can see from the table view's scroll knob that the list of articles with the string "WA1" in them is still quite large. Figure 3 shows the state of the search when the search field is extended to read "WA1L":

WA1Lsearch
Figure 3 - Search further narrowed to "WA1L"

Notice that the scroll knob is now longer, indicating that the list has been pruned down.


Using the Year/Month Qualifiers

Next, watch what happens when we further qualify the search in Figure 3 by looking only at the issues from the year 1978:

1978qualifier
Figure 4 - List of articles with "WA1L" in 1978


The list in Figure 4 is now reduced to just eight articles. The articles remaining in the table view are articles from 1978 that has WA1L in any of the columns in the table view.

QST Browser is set up so that when you enter "197" in the year qualifier, it does not look for articles from 197 AD, but for articles from the decade 1970-1979. If you type "19" into the year qualifier field, only articles from 1900-1999 will show up.


Search Criteria

Now notice the little arrow in the search field. Clicking on the arrow will bring up the search field's pop-up menu for selecting the various search criteria:

predicate
Figure 5 - Search Criteria pop-up menu


The default criteria will apply the search string to all of the fields that you see in the table view. Notice for example in Figure 4, that the search has also picked up the string WA1L when it appears in the title of the article. If we now change the search criterion to only look for the author's callsign field, we obtain the following result:

callsign
Figure 6 - search for "WA1L" in the callsign column for 1978

As mentioned in the introduction, the search has limited functionality for QST View issues from the year 2000 on.

To make it slightly more convenient than not having any database at all, I have created three collections of pages for the post 2000 CD-ROMS. The three collections are the covers (front, inside front, back, inside back), the table of contents (assuming that it starts on page 4 of each QST issue) and the rest of the issue (about 180 pages).

I could not create the starting and ending pages for the individual articles. You will have to "leaf" through the entire issue of the new CD-ROM as if you are reading a paper edition of QST. You can still use the Year and Month qualifiers. And you can use the Table of Contents page to help you jump to the page of the issue you want to read (just as you do with a printed copy of QST). Figure 7 shows the limited search functionality.

2001
Figure 7 - Limited search function for QST Views from year 2000 onwards

Next: Viewing an article