Enhanced query dialog (Professional Edition only)

With the new enhanced query dialog you can build up complex queries and save them for use later. Use the same query dialog when searching for clips in the catalog locally or querying the remote database (with the optional Workgroup Server).

• First, select the clip property to search on. This will display a list of operations based on the column type (text, timecode, date, or boolean).
• Then, select the comparison operation, enter any parameters (such as the text to search for) and options (such as case sensitive comparison).
• If you want to search on additional clip properties at the same time press Add term to add a new row. You can add as many terms as you want (though with more terms the query may take longer to execute).
• Normally all the terms must match for a clip to be found (ie. the terms are combined by a logical 'AND' operation). If you check the 'OR' box then one (or more) of the 'OR' terms must match, as well as all the 'AND' terms.
• Check the 'NOT' box to exclude clips matching that term.

Named queries

• Press the Create button, then enter a name and press Save to save a named query.
• Named queries are stored in the local preferences file and are available in later sessions. Select a previously saved named query from the drop down list to use it.
• Check the Show in toolbar option to turn the query into a quick filter that can be used to filter the clips shown in the main window.

Remote searches

When querying the remote database (with optional Workgroup Server only) you have the following options:

• Return additional clips similar to the ones matched by the query.
• Return all the thumbnails associated with a clip or just the poster thumbnail.
• Press Find Clips to create a new query results window showing all the matching clips, regardless of which catalog they are in.
• Press Find Catalogs to display a list of matching catalogs within the database, including a count of how many clips in each catalog match the query.

Local searches

• When searching for clips locally within a catalog you can either move to the next matching clip or create a new window showing all the matches. See searching and filtering.
• When doing local searches within a catalog you can set a Preferences option to use the original simpler query dialog from CatDV 2.5 instead if you prefer.
• A different browse catalogs mechanism is provided to search across multiple catalogs locally on disk. Because the catalogs are not stored in a relational database, as they are with remote searches, the search capability provided is much less sophisticated.

Regular expressions

In regular expressions many characters have special meaning to match particular groups of characters. For example, '^' and '$' match the start and end of a line respectively, '.' matches any character, '[A-Za-z]' matches any upper case or lower case letter, '\s' or '[:space:]' means any white space character, '\d' or '[0-9]' or '[:digit:]' means any digit, '\S' means any visible (non-space) character, and '\b' matches a word boundary. '*' means the previous character can match any number of times (0 or more), '?' means it's optional (matches 0 or 1 times), and '+' means matches 1 or more times. To prevent one of these characters from having its special meaning precede it with a '\'. For example, 'h[ea]llo' or '(hello|hallo)' will match 'hello' or 'hallo', while '\(.*\)' will search for pairs of parentheses.

Using the Search and Replace tool you can search for a regular expression and use the results of that expression in the replacement. Any text that matches a sub-expression in the search term inside parentheses '(' and ')' can be inserted into the replacement text using '\1' for the first term and so on. For example, you could search for '^(\S+) (\S+)' and replace it with '\2 \1' to swap the first two words of each line, or search for '.*XXX.*' and replace it with nothing to delete all comments tagged with the text 'XXX'.