Cells, tables, and most other forms exist as closely related objects within AXIS. The AXIS interface is designed to facilitate the user's interactive control over the processes of creating, reviewing, editing and executing these objects. Interactive processing gives the user the power to quickly make changes and immediately determine the effect of the change on a specific object. When processes are time-consuming to define or execute, however, there are also Batch processes that can be defined and launched to enable more efficient use of the user's time.
Interactive actions performed on objects are approached in a consistent way regardless of the object or action to be taken. Essentially, the following three steps are required in this order:
Select the type of object;
Designate the specific object or objects to be used;
Select and launch an action to be performed.
First you select what type of object you want to deal with (e.g. Cell) from the View menu on the Menu Bar. Immediately, a list of the objects of that type will appear in a window.
You may only work with one object type at a time, and that object will appear with a check mark beside it when the View Menu is opened. Before changing the choice of object type and displaying a new list, all open windows relating to objects of the previous type must be closed.
The use of the View Menu is discussed further in the help topics:
Once the object type is selected, AXIS will display a list of all objects of that type in the current dataset. One of the items in the list will always be clearly highlighted as the "current" item. The method of highlighting the current item is user selectable through the Preferences Tab in the System Parameters Window.
When a list is first displayed the current item is always the last one used. A simple mouse click, or pressing the up or down cursor movement keys changes the designation of which item is the "current" item in a list. The current object will be used for any action, such as "edit" or "run", which only applies to a single object.
Other actions may apply to single or multiple objects at a time (e.g. delete, copy, transfer, etc.). If you wish to apply an action to a set of objects, you must "select" them first. When you choose an action for which multiple objects are valid, AXIS will give you the option of using the current object or the selected objects.
You designate one or more objects as "selected" by pressing the spacebar, or in other ways (see How to Select Objects). "Selected" objects are highlighted by dark background to distinguish them from the "current" object, and stay selected even when the current object is changed.
To assist you in viewing and manipulating the list of items , you can sort the list by clicking in one of the column headers (e.g. Name, ID). Clicking again will reverse the sort order. You may <Shift> click in another column header to establish a secondary sort order.
You may also shorten the list to show only the selected items by clicking the "Selected" radio button at the bottom of the window. You may rebuild the list at any time by clicking on "Selected" or "All".
You choose an action from a menu of available actions, which may be displayed by using the right mouse click anywhere in the object list window, or by using the Actions button found on the Action Bar near the top of the Application Window. The actions menu varies according to the type of object and whether you have selected multiple objects from the list.
Actions near the top of the actions menu only apply to single objects (e.g. Edit, Run, Find). A group of actions further down the actions menu (e.g. Print, Transfer, Delete) all have a triangle after the action name indicating the use of a submenu, which for these actions allows you to choose between performing the action on the current item or all selected item(s).
A final item in the Actions Menu is the Advanced item, which opens a submenu of choices of advanced actions which can also be applied to either the current or selected items.
More details on available actions is provided in the topic Using the Actions Button.