The Selection Dialog

To activate, select the Search, Select menu item or click on the  tool bar button.  This will bring up the following dialog:

The 3 boxes across the top of the dialog are where each criteria is established.  The criteria is then moved to the next available Selection Criteria box.  Each selection box has opening and closing parentheses buttons, a negating Not button and an And/Or slide switch.  The parentheses and Not button are active when they are red.  In the example dialog above, badges will be selected if the Employee Name field contains “Jim Smith” OR the Employee Number field is less than 147.  At the bottom of the dialog is a check box (labeled Case Sensitive Character Comparisons) to set whether or not character comparisons take account of the case of the letters ‘A’ through ‘Z’.  If the box is not checked, ‘B’ will be considered the same as ‘b’, for example.  If checked, lower and upper case letters will be considered different.  (See Case Sensitive Comparisons for an important note about case sensitive comparisons.)

We will now look at this dialog a little closer.  Each criteria consists of 3 parts.  The first is the name of the Database Field, the second is the actual Criteria to be applied (“equal to”, “less than”, etc.), and the Match Condition to compare against.  The first 2 are selected by clicking on the associated down arrow and making the desired selection.  The third is a text entry box in which you can type the text you wish.

The Database Field pull-down includes all the data fields assigned to the database.  It will also include fields for the Datakey, PhotoFile, Changed and Template fields.  (The last two will not be present on older-style single template databases.)

The Datakey field is a unique numeric value assigned to each card.  As this number can be displayed on the badge it may be useful to be able to select on it.

If a field has the Date, Time or Timestamp format, then the entry field will contain a preformatted field.  For more information on how to enter dates and times see Date, Time and Timestamp Fields.  See Searching for Times and Dates for some special information on searching for dates and times.

The PhotoFile field only has one criteria; is Defined.  If you wish, once entered into a Selection Criteria box, you can click the Not button to select on badges which do not have photos taken yet.  This feature is valuable when you wish to only print badges for which photos exist, for example.  Obviously, there is no Match Criteria for this selection.  If your database has layouts with multiple different photographs on them, this will select a badge if any one photo has been defined, not when all have.  When the Not button is active, selection will occur on all badges which have none of their photographs defined.

Similarly, the Changed field can be selected based upon whether or not it is defined.  This might be useful in conjunction with the PhotoFile field to select all badges which have changed AND also have photographs.  To create such a selection enter two such selection criteria and make sure the And/Or slide switch is in the And position (see below).

When a criteria has been set it is transferred to the next available criteria box by clicking on the Add button.  This process can be repeated up to 6 times.  The last added criteria can be removed by clicking on the Delete button and all the criteria can be removed by clicking on the Clear button.

The parentheses buttons allow the logical relationship between criteria to be modified and the example which follows clarifies their function.  The Not button allows the criteria on the same line to be negated.  If the first Not button was activated in the dialog above, badges with the Employee Name field not equal to “Jim Smith” or the Employee Number field is less than 147 would be selected.

The And/Or slide switch is used to determine how the criteria are linked together.  Each time you click on the switch it will slide to the opposite position.  To the left And is selected and to the right Or.

When you open the dialog box, the 3 boxes across the top will contain the criteria in the lowest Selection Criteria box.  Each time Delete is pressed, the boxes will adopt the values of the new last criteria.  If there are no previously entered criteria, the boxes will go to their default conditions.  To revise the last criteria entered, simply press Delete to remove the last one from the list, make the changes to the entry boxes and select Add.  The revision will be where the old criteria was located.

You can also save and load selection criteria.  When the dialog is set up the way you want, you can save it by entering a name in the Stored Criteria area and clicking the Save button.  This criteria can quickly be retrieved later by clicking the dropdown button against Name and selecting the stored name, the pressing the Load button.  If you need to delete a stored criteria, select it from the drop down and click the Delete button.