The AMPR Map Collection Manager User’s Guide
Creating and Using Field Profiles
The List view of the collection window displays some or all of your collection’s data fields. At times you may want the List to show columns for all of the fields in your collection. At other times you may want to only display a subset of the fields. You can change the displayed set of fields (and their display order) via the Field Selection dialog (accessed via the Field Selection choice off of the Options menu). But, in addition, you can save this information (a chosen set of fields, and their order) in a “field profile”. Once you have created a field profile, you can use the Set Field Selection from Profile (on the Options menu), to quickly set the List’s display to match what is specified in the profile. You can create multiple profiles; the profiles are saved as part of the collection.
In addition to allowing you to save multiple custom List views, field profiles are also useful in conjunction with printing and exporting data. Printing from the List view and exporting data (either to Excel or to an ASCII file) both produce output that matches the List view: Only the fields that are shown in the List are printed/exported, and their order in the output matches the order in the List. As an example, suppose you would like to periodically export data from your collection to Excel, just to do some spreadsheet computation on the price information in your collection database. You could create a field profile that specifies just one field: Price. Whenever you want to run your price computations, just use Set Field Selection from Profile to switch the List to display according to this profile. Then run Export to Excel. You could then switch the List back to a fuller display by selecting a different profile (for example, you might have created a profile named “Full data” that includes all of the fields).
To create a field profile, select Manage Field Profiles off of the Options menu. The following dialog box will be displayed:
This picture shows what the dialog box looks like when you don’t have any profiles yet defined for your collection. If you have one or more profiles defined, the dialog will start out with one of your profiles selected:
Use the drop-down list to switch to see other profiles that you have defined; selecting any profile causes the fields contained in that profile to be displayed in the larger area in the middle of the dialog box.
To create a new profile, click the Create New Profile button. This brings up the following dialog box:
Enter a new name for the profile you are creating. Then use the various arrow buttons to select which fields will be included in the profile (the “Shown fields”), or to modify the order of the selected fields. The dialog initially displays the choices based on the current display in the List view. The example shown here reflects what will be shown if the List view is currently displaying all of the collection’s fields.
In the Manage Field Profiles dialog there are also buttons that allow you to edit or delete an existing profile. If you choose to edit a profile, the same dialog box that is used for creating a new profile will be shown, but the values it shows will reflect the profile you have asked to edit. If you ask to delete a profile, the program will prompt you to confirm the deletion.
Once you have created one or more profiles, you can request that the List view be changed to match a particular profile. You do this by via Set Field Selection from Profile on the Options menu. Selecting this menu item will bring up a sub-menu that lists all the field profiles that you have defined. Select the one you want and the List view will switch to match the selected profile.
Note: If you have multiple collections, the profiles you create are each specific to just one collection: the collection that was active when the profile was created. This is because different collections can define different sets of fields, and there is no guarantee that a profile created with one collection will work appropriately with a different collection.
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