How to use Grids in AQT

AQT uses grids in many of its windows, not just for displaying data but also for miscellaneous other functions.

The following describes how to use the grid. Note that not all these functions will be available, depending on which AQT window you are using.

Sorting Rows

Rows can be sorted by clicking on the column header. Click once to sort ascending (a little up-arrow will appear on the right of the column header). Click a second time to sort descending. Click a third time to have no sorting.

You can sort by multiple-columns. To do this, hold down the Shift key then click on a second column. The grid will be sorted by your first column then the second column.

Selecting a Range of Cells

To select multiple cells:

• click on one cell
• hold the Shift button down and click on another cell

All the cells between the two clicked-on cells will be selected.

In some places you can selected a range of cells of dragging the mouse over them.

Copying

To copy cells (to the Windows clipboard), select a range of cells then hit CTRL+C. A menu will offer various options:

• Delimit columns with The character used to delimit the cells. Select Tab if you wish to paste the data into Excel. You can use another character by either selecting one from the list, or typing a value.
• Delimit rows with The character used to delimit successive lines. You would normally specify LineFeed, but you can use another character by either selecting one from the list, or typing a value.
• Include header? Whether the column header is to be included with the cells. This can be useful if the data is to be transferred to Excel or Word.
• Copy mode This option specifies whether the data is to Replace or be Appended to the existing data in the clipboard. This can be useful if you are wishing to copy non-contiguous ranges of cells.

Moving Columns

In some places in AQT, you can change the order of the columns in the grid. You do this by dragging a column header left or right. A vertical line will appear in the new position for the column.

Moving Rows

The grid has no in-built mechanism for moving rows. In places where rows can be moved, there will be Move Up and Move Down buttons.

Note: there is a slight peculiarity with Move Up/Down. If you have sorted the grid by a column, Move Up/Down may appear not to work. This is because the grid maintains the sort order. In other words, after you have moved the row, the grid will resort the grid as per the specified column order. The result may seem like the row hasn't moved. The solution to this is to remove the sorting (click the column header until there is no sort-icon).

Printing

You can print the data in a grid from the menu option Print > Print Data. You can set Printing Data options.

Resizing Columns

In most places, AQT will automatically size column to the width of the data.

In the Data Display window, there is a maximum width the columns will be sized to. You can set this with Options > Display Options > Maximum Column Width.

You can manually increase / decrease the size of columns by resizing the columns in the column header. Alternatively, you can do a resize-to-contents by double-clicking the divider to the right of the column name (in the column header). Automatic resizing can be very slow if your grid has a large number of rows.

In the Data Display window, if you have a very large text value, you can see the full contents of the value by double-clicking the cell.

Editing

In a number of places in AQT you can amend the contents of a grid.

In most cases, when you enter an editable field, you will be placed in edit mode. You can tell you are in edit mode because the row indicator (on the left) will change from an arrow to a pencil. If not, you can activate edit-mode by typing in the cell or hitting F2.

In many places, a cell change will only come into effect when you move to the next cell or row in the grid.

If you have amended a cell, and want to cancel this change, hit Esc. The cell will revert back to the earlier text.

Grouping

In the Data Display window, you can automatically group your data by a column value by dragging the column to the group-by area at the top of the grid. You can group-by multiple columns.

You can remove a column from the group-by area, drag it out of the group-by box.

Filter

Many grids have a Filter box at the top. This allows you to show only particular entries. As you enter text in the Filter, entries will be shown/hidden in the grid.

In most cases, such as displaying a list of tables, only the first column in the grid (eg. the table name) will be searched.

In some places you can double-click the Filter box to see a more comprehensive dialog for specifying the filter.

Qualifiers

By default, the filter will show rows that contain your filter text anywhere. However you can specify some other options:

Notes

• The minus-sign and # can be used in conjunction with the other three qualifiers. The # (if used) must be the first character. The minus (if used) must come after the # and before the other qualifiers.
• Regular Expressions are a powerful way of specifying complex searches. Documentation on these is not included here.

Examples

Note that characters such as _, \ and % do not have any special meaning in the filter and can be used to search for those characters.