User Interface
Text File Explorer is shown below. It is in its initial state after opening the file ChicagoCrimes.csv. This file can be found on the internet if you search for it. Note the title bar contains the file name, the size of the file, the approximate number of lines in the file, and the line ending character sequence. The control bar beneath the title bar is called the Drilldown Control Bar. When a drilldown is applied to the View, it will be shown here.
The control bar that runs along the bottom of the application is the View Control Bar. It is here where you can set the size of the View, see the numerical results of the drilldowns applied, and navigate the results after the drilldowns have been applied to the View.
The File Navigation Bar that runs down the left side of the application allows you to move the View about the extent of file
The Token Panel on the right side of the application controls and displays the tokens that were extracted from the currently selected line in the display, and the tokens extracted from the entire View. The tokens are one-click drilldowns.
The display in the middle shows the lines from the View that have been kept after the drilldowns have been applied. You can switch the display to show the lines that have been dropped after the drilldowns have been applied.
Below we show the application after two drilldown have be applied. The green PULASKI keep drilldown and the red ROBBERY drop drilldown. This translates to keep only the lines that have the character sequence PULASKI in them and drop the lines that have the character sequence ROBBERY in them.
At the bottom of the application on the View Control Bar you can see that the View size is set to 10000, the 80 lines that pass the two drilldowns, and 9920 lines that failed the drilldowns. We call these the results.
The Scrolling part of the View Control Bar allows you scroll the results one line at a time, a half page at a time, or a whole page at a time. The Jump dropdown button allows you to move about the results using a dropdown menu. This makes it easy to move around the results, especially when there is a large number of lines in the results.
Note at the beginning of each line there are two numbers separated by a colon character. The first number is the line number of the results, and the second number is the line number of the line within the View. When there are no drilldowns defined, the results and the View are the same.
Below we introduce the Drilldown Control Console. It can be opened from the Drilldown Control Bar, from the keyboard by entering Ctrl-D, by selecting text in the display, or by double clicking on a word in the display.
A Drilldown can be created by using the Drilldown Control Console, by selecting a Line or View token, or by selecting an entry from the Drilldown History dropdown buttons. The history buttons are located on the Drilldown Control Bar and on the Drilldown Control Console.
Tokens
Tokens are character sequences that have been extracted from the text in the file being explored using a simple set of user defined extraction rules.
The Line Tokens are extracted from the currently selected line in the results display. The tokens from the line are displayed as a set of vertically oriented character sequences. Below we show the application and will focus on the Line Tokens shown on the right.
Note the selected line in the results display. Since there are no drilldowns defined, the results will be all the lines from the View. The tokens shown in the Tokens Panel are the character sequences extracted from the selected line using the set of rules shown in the Token Extraction area at the bottom of the panel. You should be able to correlate the tokens to what is seen in the selected line. You can move the selected line up or down by using the two arrow buttons above the tokens.
The beauty of the tokens is that they are one-click drilldowns. This behavior supports the instantness of the user interactions with the user interface.
As shown above in the Token Extraction area,
The token extraction rules apply to the currently selected line, and any changes made to them are instantly reflected in the tokens shown. Additionally, the extraction rules will be used to generate the View Tokens which we will address next. Below we show the application with the View Tokens selected. At the top of the View tokens panel there are three buttons. The first is used to manually run the View Tokenizer. The second is used to stop the View Tokenizer. The third is the Auto-Run checkbox, which causes the View Tokenizer to run automatically every time a new View is selected in the Navigation Bar. With a large View size, it takes time as each line is tokenized with the resultant token table being generated as shown below. Note that besides just the tokens found, the table contains how many times that token appeared in the View. The table can be sorted alphanumerically, or by the number of occurrences. This is extremely insightful. As with line tokens, a single click on a table entry will produce a drilldown.