Results of searches are returned in the form of tables with each
row in the table representing a document satisfying the search criteria.
An example is shown below.
There are a lot of choices for what one might want to appear in such a table. Metadata documents may contain a variety of information and one may want to see different information for various document types. [Of course, one can examime the entire XML metadata document by right-clicking on a row in the table.] In Morpho, the result set table can be dynamically configured by clicking the "Config" button, shown in the upper right of the above picture. Carrying out this action causes a dialog to appear like that shown below:
The dialog shown above has a list of all document types that are currently understood by either the local machine or the catalog system. [More precisely, this means that the DTDs for these XML documents are registered with either the client or the server.] The user can select one or more of the available document types (use the Ctrl and/or Shift keys for multiple selections) and then click on the "->" buttons to place the selected document types in the text areas on the right. Note that one can select both 'document types to be searched' and 'document types to be returned'. As the name implies, 'document types to be searched' set the actual documents to be searched. Most often, one will seach all the metadata documents, but it may be desirable to actually return only those metadata documents that directly describe the data. Because metadata documents are associated with each other in 'packages', the user may want to search all documents, but only view overall description documents. This is the purpose of the 'document types to be returned' option. The system will automatically return requested document types associated (by packages) with the document which actually contained the searched for information.
Clicking the second tab in this result set configuration dialog will
bring up a screen like that shown in the figure below:
The "Set Query Fields" tab allows the user to set which elements of the various document types get displayed in the result tables returned as a result of a query. Selecting a document type in the left box shows all the elements(fileds) in that document type, arranged as an outline, in the middle box. The "->" button can then be used to add that field to the list on the right. Query Result Fields will then be displayed as columns in the next search.