Quick Search
If you know some information about the animal / client but not the client name you can usually still find the record, how:
- If you use a / at the Animal or Farm name prompt, the
system will prompt you for up to five search items e.g. canine, black etc.
It will then read each card in turn looking for possible records.
- The various client lists options allow you to search based on the
criteria entered.
- Enter either the animal name or the address (or both) and the system
will try for a partial match
- Use the report generator
- How many Clients live in Hillside
- How many dogs do I have registered
- A misspelling of Abyssinian, which record is it?
- How many stamps will I need to mailshot postcode area EH39
- Ignoring Rats what other Rodents do I have, and who are they?
There is another way:
Main Menu -> General Applications -> Search and Statistics
These menu options allow you to quickly search your database either for just the number of records found or a list of the records. It is also very quick. e.g. Searching 25,000 animals using /absy from the menu took 1 min 23 seconds, using the same search here it took 2 seconds.
However, we did cheat :-) The search routines here use the Operating System tools to search a text file - this text file has to be created first.
The idea behind this option was to allow you to easily answer the How many type questions and find the various mis-spelling that can occur. So the slight overhead of running a re-build option will not be a problem.
Just prior to using the search routines, or on a regular basis, pick the option Rebuild search file, this will re-generate the text file. It does not take long about 2-3 mins. Once created the search routines will use it automatically.
Entering a search
In the Search for box enter the details you want, in the case of looking for mis-spellings you can enter multiple criteria separated with a pipe symbol (|) e.g. boxar|parrot|budgie etc.You are then asked if you want to ignore any records, this applies to the records found on the 1st match. e.g. you can search for canine but then ignore boxer.
You are then given the option of just the number of record found i.e. to answer the 'How many' question or a list of the records. If you select the list option you have an additional choice of printer, screen or file. The file option can be used for mail merging.
Overall it is quick and simple. You will see the commands the system executes, for the more advanced of you, looking at the manual pages for grep and family you can take advantage of regular expressions and wildcard match's to do a lot more.
Note: Related records will have the word Related while master records will have the word Master included in the text. This will enable you to look for (or ignore) related records.
Run a search routine
(Note: looking at the release version, you will need an upgrade before you can play with this option - March 97)
For the REALLY ambitious of you this option is want.
The search routines above use an ascii text file, you may find you are running the same routine again and again. You can create a file with the routine in it and access it via this option.
The Ascii file will be called: ascifile and will be located in /u/vetdata (or wherever your veterinary data exists).
Create your routines in /u/source/scripts and end the filename with grep, if you want to give the script a name or description use a line similar to: # @(#) Name of script somewhere in the file.
It can be as simple as grep -c Canine ascifile to count the number of dogs you have from time to time or as complicated as you want. To see an example look at the script /u/source/scripts/stats.grep this is a fairly elaborate example and emulates the old statistics program (but a lot faster).