Main_Window

## ACEDB Main Window

This help contains information on how to use the ACEDB Main Window.

For more general help refer to these pages:

- what is Acedb ?
- Table of Contents for these help pages
- general features of the Acedb user interface
- distribution and copyright information
- Acedb documentation server at Nalusda

## To exit the program, choose Quit from the menu in the Main Window.

The Main Window presents a list of Classes, which are the categories around which information is organized in the database. For example, a class called "Locus" could be designed to store information about genetic markers. Each class consists of a list of members called "objects". The objects named ABC1 and xyz-1 might be members of the Locus class.

By default all visible classes (as specified in wspec/options.wrm) are displayed in the class chooser. The way classes are presented is configurable on the layout editor by clicking the button "Set Selection"

The Main Window lets you find objects in the database in several ways:

1. You can pick a visible Class by clicking with the left mouse button. Clicking again will give a list of the names of all objects in that class in the Main KeySet, also called a Selection List. You can restrict this list by typing a template in the yellow Search box. When you press the RETURN key you obtain all names matching the text in the yellow box. Name recognition usually is not case sensitive, except if this option was explicitly requested by the database curator. Do not be too fancy. Named are recognized as-is, backslashes quotes and punctuation will be assumed to belong to the name. However ? and * are used as wildcards:

- * in the template will match anything; e.g. "S*" will match all names beginning with 'S', "*S*" will match all names containing an 'S', "*a*b" all names containing an 'A' and ending with a 'B'.
- ? in the template will match any single character, e.g. "???" will match all names that are exactly three characters long.

To actually display an object you must pick its name twice in the Main KeySet. A new window will open containing more information about the object. The new window might contain text or be a special display, like a genetic map.

2. You can search the database by typing a text string in the Text Search box (first click on it with the left button to make it yellow). This will find all the objects in the database which contain the search text. More precisely, we find all objects whose name contains the search string, all objects that refer to this object, and all objects containing searchable Text (or other X class data) containing the search string.

3. You can pick any other class Class by filing the search box and then clicking on the black triangle following the words in Class: with the left or the right mouse button. In addition the Main Window menu allows access to other applications and functions of ACEDB, many of which have their own help:

### Menu items:

- Quit: Quits entire program.
- Help: Displays this help page.
- Clean up: Kills all ACEDB windows except Main.
- Program Status: Info on memory/disk usage.
- Add Update file: To read official data Update.
- Preferences: To configure your display preferences.
- Query: Opens Query Commands window.
- Query by Examples: Opens Query by Example window.
- Query builder: Opens Query Builder window.
- Table Maker: Opens TableMaker window.
- DNA: Opens DNA Analysis window.
- Chronometer: Opens Chronometer window, for timing ACEDB activities (for programmers).
- Sequence Assembly and Mapping: Available with the Acembly program.
- Comparative maps: A set of tools developed by John Edwards and Joe Dicks to compare chromosomes from different species, also called Oxgrids .

The following entries only exist if your username is registered in wspec/passwd.wrm:

- Add/Delete/Rename/Alias Objects: Opens window for adding and editing objects.
- Read .ace files: Opens .ace file parser for reading in data.
- Align maps: Opens Align window for building maps.
- Read Models: Run this after modifying wspec/models.wrm
- Dump: Dumps entire database in ace format.
- Session control: To preserve or backtrack to an earlier state of the database. This tool can also be used to recover the database in the rare case of a fatal disk error, see Session_control
- Write Access/Save: Toggle to get write access or save data to database. Save commits changes permanently and releases write access.

to Table of Contents

last edited: April 1999