The ACeDB Keyset Window

Help page wrtten by Martin Aslett, August 1997

As of version 4.5 of ACeDB, the KeySet window has been substantially modified in order to increase ease of use and to subdivide the pulldown menu into related submenus.

The arrowheaded bar on the left of the window acts a scroll bar. The user may click on the arrowheads to scroll up and down the keyset a page at a time or alternatively drag the green rectangle up and down the scroll bar to scroll more quickly through large keysets.

Multiple items in the keyset may now be selected by single clicking on them one by one or for items grouped together in the keyset by clicking on the first or last item in the group and dragging the mouse over the other items. Selected items are indicated by a grey background.

The buttons at the top of the display allow access to a range of pull down menus and functions to be performed on the keyset. All pulldown menus are accessed by clicking and holding down the right hand mouse button whilst the pointer is over the appropriate button. The buttons are in order :-

Show As

This button can be used either as a pulldown menu or simply by clicking it to toggle through its options. It allows the user to control how objects in the keyset will be displayed if they are clicked on. The basic options are 'Text' to display as text or 'Graph' to produce the default display set in the options.wrm file using the -Display option.

Biblio

Clicking this button brings up the Biblio display window for the keyset.

More Info

Clicking this button brings up the Forest display for the keyset.

Quit

Clicking this button quits the keyset window.

Query

This button may be used either to produce a pulldown menu for the keyset (containing items related to querying the keyset) or can simply be clicked upon. In the latter case, a text box appears below the button allowing the user to perform a command line query on the keyset.

If used as a pulldown menu, there are currently options :-

Query - Lets the user perform a command line query as with clicking on the button.
Follow - Brings up a tag chooser window for the keyset, allowing the user to perform the 'follow' query command on one of the tags (i.e. to produce a keyset containing all instances of that tag linked to by items in the keyset).
Find neighbours - Finds all objects in the database referred to by items currently in the keyset.
Query by Example - Allows the user to perform a 'Query by Example' on the keyset.

Select/Modif

This button allows the user to bring up a pulldown menu containing options related to editing and copying of the keyset. The menu options are as follows :-

Add/remove items one by one - Allows the user to add or remove items from the keyset one by one. Double clicking an item in the keyset removes it. Double clicking an item in another keyset adds it to the current keyset.
New empty keyset - Allows the user to create a new empty keyset window.
Copy whole keyset - Copies the whole keyset into another keyset window.
Save current keyset as - Only available if the user has write access. Allows the user to save the keyset as an item in the KeySet class of the database.
Select All - Selects the whole keyset.
Clear selection - Deselects all selected items.
Reverse selection - Deselects all selected items and selects all previously unselected items.
Remove selected items - Removes all selected items from the keyset.
Copy selected items - Copies the selected items to a new keyset.

Export

This button allows the user to bring up a pulldown menu containing options for exporting and mailing the objects in the keyset in various formats. Choosing each option calls up a new window allowing the user to save the data into a file of the appropriate type or click a 'Mail' button to mail the file to an e-mail address. The various options are as follows :-

ace file - Exports the keyset data as a standard .ace file.
ace file with timestamps - Exports the data as a .ace file with timestamps included.
list of names - Exports the names of the data items in the keyset as an item of the Keyset class in .ace file format.
DNA in FASTA format - Exports DNA from any sequence objects in the keyset in FASTA format.
Protein in FASTA format - Exports peptide sequence from any protein objects in the keyset in FASTA format.
Protein alignment - Exports protein sequence alignments for any sequences in the keyset.

Other

Clicking this button displays or hides three other buttons on the keyset window :-

Combine - produces a pulldown menu allowing logical operations to be performed on two keyset windows. The operators are as follows :-

OR - takes the union of the two sets
AND - takes the intersection of the two sets
MINUS - removes any item contained by the second keyset form the first
XOR - results in the exclusive OR of the two sets (i.e items in one of the keysets but not in both).

Class Names - Toggles displaying of the name of the class of each item in the keyset.

Edit/Kill - produces a pulldown menu of items which may only be used if the user has Write Access. The menu options are :-

Edit selected objects - allows the user to edit all selected items from the keyset online. Particularly useful for adding identical data for the same tag to many objects.
Kill selected - allows the user to delete any selected objects from the database.

Help

Clicking this button brings up the online help for the Keyset window.

In addition to the menus available from the buttons at the top of the window, the KeySet window has a main pulldown menu (reached by clicking anywhere on the window except on the buttons. Most of the options are duplicates of those available from the other pulldown menus but the following options are only available from the main menu :-

Print - calls up a window allowing the user to print the keyset, e-mail it or save it to a text or postscript file.
Import keyset - allows a keyset to be read into the database form a file (requires Write Access to do so). Mail - allows mailing to e-mail addresses contained by the keyset.
Keyset Summary - gives a brief summary of what the keyset contains (classes contained and the number of each class).
Show as Multimap - displays items in the keyset on the Multimap display via Tablemaker.

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last edited: Septembre 1997