The Joy of Sets

March 19, 2009

Can you remember which records you want to publish in a particular publication? Is it all the records in one table? Just the companies in North America? Only the products on special offer? Only the ones that are in the "Over 50s" category? A selection that you chose manually? Use CatBase's  Set Manager to create and maintain any number of sets of data!

What a Set can do

Sets can be used in two ways:

1. You tell the Set Manager which table to draw data from and how to determine which records to include in the Set.
2. You can create an “ad-hoc” set and save it

Using the Set Manager

The Set Manager lets you define Sets – or selections – of data based on one or more criteria that you specify. CatBase will then keep the set updated so that if records are added, modified, or deleted they will be included or excluded from the set, as appropriate.

Here’s an example of a Set that includes all customers in either Australia or New Zealand:

Set Manager - Australia and New Zealand

Creating an “ad-hoc” set

You’ve just done a rather complicated query and found a set of records that you might want to revisit. Or maybe you manually selected some companies that you want to target for a marketing campaign and you need to have a way of instantly finding that same selection again.

No problem!

Choose Save these Records as a Set from the File menu and enter a name for the set. If you subsequently want to change the records in that set, simply re-save them with the same name; you’ll be asked if you want to replace the existing set.

How Sets can be used

• View your set at any time: Click on the Find Data button on the main window and choose the appropriate table from the pop-up menu, then select the set name from the pop-up menu in the middle section of the Search Dialogue Window
• Use the set in a Publishing Project
• Create an Event in the Event Scheduler to automatically update the set according to a specified schedule

There’s a detailed tutorial on the Set Manager on our web site.

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