Exploring and Selecting

Accelerus has many handy features available to explore and search for records, whether to open a particular record to make changes to it or to link it to other records, eg to assign a teacher to a class.

Accelerus users who have been assigned a school level role and who login to the Accelerus database, have two methods available to them to browse through, select and open entity records, whether a teacher, a subject, a particular report run, comment bank, etc. These are:

•	Quick Find

AND

•	Explorer windows.

Both are very useful, but the main differences are:

•	The level of filtering differs between the two.

Quick Find searches all of the different entities in the one search process, but does not allow you to hone in on specific fields or a type of data. For example, if you wish to find a student with the family name Martin in a particular year level, you would be better searching via the Student Explorer. This allows you to enter search criteria in both the family name and year level fields, whereas in the Quick Find pane, you may only enter text for one field. In addition, it will bring up all Martins in the database, whether teachers or students, and whether this is their family or given name.

•	Explorer windows show more detail about each record than Quick Find.

•	Explorer windows may be customised, eg you may choose which fields appear in each Explorer, change the order of columns, etc.

•	Explorers allow you to do more than just find records.

You may add new records directly from the Explorers, and perform various other processes in bulk, eg delete multiple records, lock assessment items, etc.

Despite their differences, many of the procedures in Quick Find and the Explorers are common to both.

There are selection protocols that apply across Accelerus in relation to the selection of individual and multiple records or rows in tables. They apply to Quick Find and to all of the Explorer windows, plus to tables within all of the different entity windows. For example you may select multiple students in the Enrolments table of a class, or select multiple rows in a subject's assessment items table, and perform various operations on these.

You may select an individual or multiple records as follows:

•	Highlight one record by clicking anywhere in its row, or move to it by using the down and up arrow keys as is possible in the list of records for an entity in the Quick Find window.

•	To select multiple individual records, hold down the Ctrl key while clicking each of the other records required.

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•	To select a contiguous group of records, hold down the Shift key while clicking the last of the records in the group to be selected.

•	In Explorers, and all other tables of data, you may also select all records listed by pressing Ctrl A or clicking the top left cell of the Explorer's table of records, as shown below.

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Although you may scroll through the records displayed in Quick Find or the various Explorer windows, it is usually easier and quicker to filter the records through the use of search criteria.

In both the Quick Find pane and the Explorer windows, search fields at the top of the window allow you to enter search criteria to hone in on particular records that you wish to find.

You may:

•	Enter text for any part of the fields for which you are searching, eg ma will find all relevant records where ma is found anywhere in the field, such as Maths, Dimatina, Drama, etc.

You may use wildcard characters in the place of one or multiple characters to find all records that comply with the search criteria, eg MA* will find all records beginning with MA.

Note that the search string is not case-sensitive, ie you can enter MAT, mat or Mat to find the same records.

•	Press Enter.

•	Wait a moment.

•	In the case of Quick Find, click the Search icon.

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•	Clicking the Reset search icon will clear out all search criteria and redisplay all records.

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When searching for records, wildcards can be entered in search criteria in place of literal characters. In Accelerus, the following wildcards may be used in the Explorer windows, in Quick Find, and in several other windows that allow the selection of records.

Wildcard

Usage

Examples

Used to signify any single character.

Example: ?an in Quick Find will find students and teachers named Ian, any three letter codes ending with an, and so forth.

1?MA*, as shown to the right, will find any Subject Code that begins with 1, where the second character can be anything, and the third and fourth are MA, followed by any other characters.

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Used in place of any number of characters.

Examples: 07* in the Subject Code field of the Subject Explorer will find all subjects with codes beginning with 07.

*and in a teacher family name field will bring up Band and Bland but not Anderson. Entering *AND* will bring up Anderson, as well as Band and Bland. This is because the asterisk wildcard will also bring up records without any characters in place of the asterisk.

In the Subject Code field to the right, * has been added to the end of the search criteria of 1?MA, to indicate that the code may then end with any other characters. Otherwise, the records would have to match 1?MA exactly.

–

The hyphen or dash indicates that a range of values is to be selected.

Example: 3-6 in the Year Level field of the Student Explorer will bring up students in years 3,4,5 and 6.

Note, however, 0–3 will not only bring up year levels 0, 1 , 2 and 3, but also, 10, 11 and 12. This is because, in an alphanumeric sort, 10, 11 and 12 are found between 1 and 2.

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The equal sign may be used for two different scenarios:

•	When you want an exact match.

Examples: =1 in a Year Level field will only bring up year 1 and not 1, 10, 11 and 12.

=Art in the Subject Name field will bring up only those subjects called Art and not Art History or Visual Arts.

•	When you want to find records that are blank, by entering just = in the field.

Example: = in the Teacher field of the Class Explorer will find all classes where no one has been assigned as teacher.

The not equal wildcard is used in a similar way to equal:

•	When you want all records except those that are an exact match, eg

Example: <>English brings up every subject except those named English exactly, ie English Literature will still appear.

•	When you want to find records that do not contain a blank in a particular field, by entering just <> in the field.

Example: <> in the End Date field of the Student Explorer finds all students without an end date.

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Greater than (>), greater than or equal to (>=), less than (<) and less than or equal to (<=) may be used in any search field to find records matching your criteria.

Example: <10 in the number of class enrolments field will find classes with fewer than 10 students

The same comparison operators may be used with non-numeric fields, so that >m in the Subject Name field will bring up subjects beginning with M and all letters after this - assuming that there are no subjects called just M, in which case >=m would need to be inserted.

The comma is used to list multiple search criteria for the one field. It should be thought of as an OR operator. It may be used in conjunction with other wildcards, eg the asterisk, to search for a series of records. Accelerus evaluates each expression between a set of commas and then finds all of the records which meet any of the criteria.

Examples: Entering 5,7,9 in the Subject Level field selects subjects which are in levels 5 or 7 or 9.

As seen to the right, =Art,Mus* has been entered in the Subject Name field to select all subjects that are named Art exactly, or any that begin with the letters Eng.

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<space>

Inserting a space in a search field works like an AND operator whereby the words or text separated by a space must both be found in the particular field, in whatever position.

Example: Entering num 100 in the Description field of the Marking Scheme Explorer will search for all marking schemes that have the num and 100 in their description, ie Num100, Num1000, NumAbs100.

On the other hand, if you wish to find all instances where an exact match of the Num and 100 can be found, use quotation marks, eg ‘Num 100’, although in this case, no records would be found as there is no marking scheme with a code that contains the string Num 100.

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' '

" "

Quotation marks may be used around search criteria to find a literal match, as described above.

Examples: Health and PE” in the Subject Explorer’s Subject Name field will only bring up subject names that have this exact sequence of characters, including spaces.

If the quotation marks are excluded, any subject that has all three of the words, in whatever order, will be found.

[ ]

[! ]

In or Not In, which use square brackets, work whereby any one character within the brackets must be matched. The In and Not In operators are usually used with other wildcards.

Example: Entering [!789] in the Year Level field of the Student Explorer would select students who were not in years 7, 8 or 9.

In the Home Group Explorer to the right, the second character of the Code must be one of 4, 5 or 6. The leading ? indicates that the first character can be anything; the square brackets hold the possible values for the second character of the code; and the * indicates that any number of other characters may follow these.

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Once you use wildcard characters in a search field, the free-form text search facility is disabled, and only those records that match the combination of text and wildcard characters will be found. For example, man* only finds fields which start with man, as the asterisk has been used at the end of the field to signify any other characters. If we wanted to find the letters man in any part of a field, an asterisk must be added at the beginning and end of the search text, ie *man*.

In both Quick Find and the Explorer windows, you may open windows using any of the following procedures:

•	Double clicking an individual record.

•	After having selected either a single record or multiple records, clicking the Open details icon found at the bottom of both types of window.

•	In the case of students, subjects and classes, you can also click the Open results icon.

In both cases, a separate tabbed window will open for each record selected.

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•	Right clicking and selecting an Open option from the menu.

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While all of the above information applies to the Quick Find and Explorer windows, selection of records may also be required in many record windows.

Many fields in various windows have a dropdown box from which a linked record may be selected. Rather than scrolling down through what may be a very long list, where there are dropdown selection boxes in various windows, you may begin typing to find records with any matching text.

In the example class record seen here, entering b in the Teacher dropdown field displays all of the teachers with b in their name or code. The first instance of matching text for each record is also highlighted.

You may continue typing characters in the field and the dropdown list will filter the list further. For example, if bu was entered, only Sara Butler would be listed.

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