Compound Searches

In larger catalogs, finding records with a single search criterion may not be efficient. To avoid sifting through tens of thousands of records, you may need to use more than one search criterion.

• You can narrow the results of a simple or compound search. (See “Narrowing the Search”.)

Setting up each condition in a compound search is the same as setting up a simple search. The only additional steps are adding a new line of search fields, and specifying the Boolean connector between each condition.

Additional conditions may be added to further refine the search. Add and delete conditions using the following buttons:

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Inserts a new search condition before the current condition. (The current condition is the line in which a field is highlighted or the flashing cursor I-beam is found. Click in any field to make that line the current condition.)

Building a compound search isn’t much more difficult than building a simple search. You just have to think in terms of what you are asking Cumulus to do, and then translate that request into the search fields.

Your request, in English, might read:

“I need all records in the Pictures category that have ‘tree’ somewhere in their names.”

Translated into Cumulus-speak, this becomes:

Now let’s break it down into separate search statements, called “conditions.”

In our first condition, Category is our search criterion, is our operator, and Pictures is the value we’re searching for. This tells Cumulus that the records we want are all in the Pictures category. This alone would find the records we’re looking for, but if our catalog contained thousands of images in the Pictures category, we’d spend quite a bit of time browsing through them all.

This next little bit is very important. This is a Boolean operator that tells Cumulus how to consider the previous and next search conditions. By selecting and, we tell Cumulus that the records we want must match both conditions of our compound search. Another option here is or, which would tell Cumulus that the records we want only need to match one of the conditions.

In the second condition of the search, we help Cumulus narrow the search results by giving it part of the record name that we want. We use the operator contains instead of is because we’re looking for records that have ‘tree’ anywhere in their names. Is would require that the record be called exactly ‘tree,’ with no variation.

In the Find window, the field values will construct a sentence similar to the one we just broke down. When you can see each condition on a line by itself, it’s easier to visualize the results of the request.