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6.3  Browsing in Catalyzer

Catalyzer provides an alternative way of viewing the contents of a catalog. You can use the browse facility to locate records and to view a set of records within a single window, ordered by the different field values. It is very useful for filtering particular types of data in your catalog (wherever in the catalog tree they are located). You can also copy the filter results to a spreadsheet.


The browse window lets you perform complex searches on your catalog with remarkable ease - for example you can show all Images which use compound Cy5 sorted by Date with a few mouse clicks.

Browsing a catalog

  1. The Browse window can be opened from the main Edit menu.

    Opening the Browse window


    Select Edit > Browse in the main window. The following screen is displayed:

    The Browse window, showing all Photo records


    The left panel displays a tree view similar to the view in the main Catalog window. It is different from the catalog tree as it is organized by the classes that are used in the catalog rather than the record hierarchy. The root is All Records and under this you can see all the classes that are currently in use and how many records use each one.

  2. You can now do the following:
    • Click a class to display all the records of that class. The records are displayed in the right panel.
    • Expand a class in the tree view to display all the fields in that class and select one of the fields to display the records that have values for that field.
    • Expand a field in the tree view to display all the values for that field and select one of the values to display the records that have the selected value for that field. For example, select Image>quality>good to show all images classified as "good".

    Showing all the Good images


Viewing records

The right panel displays the records that you are currently browsing, in a table view. Each column heading is a field name and each row contains a single record. If you click on a record in the right panel, it displays in the main Catalog window.

Sorting the records

You can sort the records by field in ascending (click once) or descending (click again) order by clicking on a column heading. browse-sort.png


The Path column in this view displays the location of the record in the catalog hierarchy.

Copying to a spreadsheet

You can copy a subselection of data to the clipboard by pressing the Copy.png Copy button on the toolbar.

The copy button is at the top right of the browse window


This can then be pasted into a spreadsheet application such as Microsoft Excel using "Paste" (or CTRL-V) within a worksheet.

The contents of the browse view pasted into Excel



"Show me all my good images". One use of Catalyzer is to add annotations to data files, such as images. If you've added a quality field to your images, with values (good / medium / bad), you can use the Browse panel to instantly pick out a list of the good ones. Expand the Image class, then the quality field. The next level in the hierarchy will have the different values with the number of corresponding records (for example, good (123) / medium(46) / bad(567)). Click on the good(123) value and the table view will show all the good records. You can sort by any of the other fields by clicking on the column headers, and copy the resulting table to the clipboard by pressing the Copy.pngcopy button. Having copied the records to the clipboard you can then paste them elsewhere in the catalog or paste them into external applications such as spreadsheets.