Searching

ClipMate has a powerful, SQL-based search engine which can quickly retrieve clips based on several criteria such text appearing in the title, body, creator name, or source URL. It can filter by data format (text, HTML, Bitmap, etc.), date of capture, and whether the clip is encrypted. You can save queries for re-use. And if the provided search criteria isn't quite what you need, you can enter queries directly as SQL (this will obviously appeal more to people who know SQL already!)

To begin a search, click on the search icon on the main toolbar, use the View | Find menu, or the Ctrl+F shortcut key. You'll be presented with the ClipMate Search dialog box. There are two major sections to the dialog.

The "Clips Containing" section lets you search on particular text occurring in various fields of the clip. If you leave them all blank, then it will return all clips that aren't filtered out by the filtering criteria.

The "Filtering Criteria" section narrows the search further by first looking for certain criteria, such as date ranges, data formats, collection membership, etc..

Both sections are optional. If you don't specify anything, then it'll return everything.

•	Whole Keywords: Enter whole words, separating by commas.

•	* Wildcard: Use the * at the END of any keywords, such as: POWER* to return any instances of Power, PowerPoint, Powerful, etc.

•	% Search String %: Can be used anywhere in the search string. For example, %ow% would return Powerpoint, lawmower, cow, own, etc.. %Winter Olympics% would return anything with Winter Olympics in it, as would %winter olympic% or %win%oly%.

Keyword Highlighting: The keywords specified in the search criteria will be passed along to the Keyword Highlighting feature (new in 6.1). Any % or * operators will be removed.

If you want to narrow the search to data of a particular format, date, etc., use the Filtering Criteria. The dates are considered 12:00AM (Midnight), so if you want to find items captured today, use the "captured after" = today's date. To find yesterday's clips, use captured after = yesterday, and captured before = today.

You can choose to narrow the search by collection. This can also dramatically speed up long-running queries on the Clip TEXT field.

Performance Note: Expect searches that use the "Clip TEXT" to run longer than searches on other fields, due to the sheer amount of data that must be processed. So be sure to narrow the search by filtering on collection and/or dates, to avoid having to process each and every piece of text.

SQL - If you want to make a really "hard core" search, you can edit the SQL directly. Click on the little "twistie" arrow on the SQL bar, and the window will expand, to show the SQL. Notice how it reacts to the various checkboxes and other input controls. You can go "out of bounds", if you know how. We expect to publish our database layout in the Support area, at the ClipMate web site.

If you want to re-use this query, you can do so with the Save/Recall section. The buttons are self-explanatory. For more details see:

We have an online "viewlet" that will SHOW you this function as a live, online demo. View it online.