Searching

pybliographic offers a quite powerful seraching mechanism. To open the search dialog, click on Edit->Search in the menu. The dialog that appears (see Figure 1-3) displays a search form at the top.

Figure 1-3. The Search dialog

Simple searches

With a simple search, you can select the field that will be searched and you can specify a regular expression to be matched. - any field - means that all the existing fields will be searched. This is usually more time-consuming.

Advanced searches

An advanced search is an expression that looks like:

has('author','name') | -has('title','test')

Such an expression means: select the entries where the field author matches name, or (symbol |) where the field title does not match test. The boolean and is noted &.

There are other commands available for this type of search:

Hierarchical searches

After a search, only the selected items are displayed in the main window. It makes it convenient to select a specific author, and then browse its publications for example.

In addition, the results of all the searches are kept in the tree located below the search form. Therefore, a new search can be a refinement of a previous one. If you select the tree item corresponding for example to all the articles written by a certain Nostradamus, you'll be able to select only those whose title contains the word eclipse.

Right-clicking in this tree pops up a contextual menu that allows you to remove unuseful searches.