Instance Selection

Some operations allow the selection of an arbitrary number of different, unrelated instances, into a single group that we call a Selection. One of the primary purposes of the Selection is to prepare information for a Report. The "Instance Selection" swatch (found to the left of the display, under the definition tree) gives three options:

• Add Instance to Selection -- the currently selected instance will be added to the selection

• Clear Selection -- remove all instances from the selection

• View Selection -- switch to view the current items in the Instance Selection

Instance may also be added to the selection (either additional or replacing the current selection) from within the Instance List. The following screen shot shows an Instance Selection:

Once a selection has been made, many things can be done against it, including:

• Move Selection -- move all the instances to a different Definition (some attribute values may be lost as a result, if the target definition doesn't contain the same attributes as the selected definition's instances). Note that one of the targets is Deletion, which allows all items in the selection to be permanently deleted.

• Create Report -- allows data from the Selection to be used in a report, in one of PDF, CSV, HTML or XML formats

• Change Owner -- changes the user who owns the instances in the selection

• Change Group -- changes the group who owns the instances in the selection

• Change Parent -- allows selection of an instance (from a selected definition) which will be substituted as the parent instance for all the currently selected instances in the Selection

• Change Attribute -- allows selected attributes to be changed, including attachments

• Change Core Attribute -- allows selected core attributes to be changed, either by directly replacement or by a search and replace