Plexus Connect - Browsing in Your Data Set

On this page:

• Opening views (grid and form views)

• Creating views

• Renaming views

• Moving and resizing widgets

• Using the table view

• Using the form view

• Conditional formatting

Opening views (grid and form views)

Views (grid and form views) are available from the dashboard. By clicking the IJC schema name in the Project section, all grid and form views of your current schema become visible in the Views section. The Favorite Views section contains your bookmarked views and the Recent Views section contains your recently opened views. Selecting a grid or form view from the list will open the chosen view in your workspace.
If you have a large number of views, you can use the search box at the top of each section to narrow the list down.
The toggle button in the Views section enables to list the views owned by you (toggle on) or display all views belonging to the schema (toggle off).
From the dashboard, you can bookmark your favorite views, create a copy of a view or delete your own views. More detailed description of Plexus Connect dashboard and its usage can be found on this documentation page.

After opening a view, both clicking the Dashboard button on the navigation bar and Plexus Connect logo on the title bar redirects you back to the dashboard.

Apart from opening from the dashboard, views can also be opened via any other opened view using the Views dropdown in the navigation bar. In this dropdown, all views belonging to the same datatree as the opened view are listed. Any of them can easily be opened by clicking the view name in the dropdown. The newly opened view appears in a new tab. Records displayed in views are synchronized, therefore, the same records are displayed in all opened views - this feature is especially useful when working with filtered data.

By clicking on the copy icon ( ) on the action bar, you can copy any opened view, including views which are owned by other users and shared to you. Clicking on the persons icon () enables you to share your view to other users. The Instant JChem icon ( ) appears when the opened view is owned by you and allows you to open your view in Instant JChem (more details about handling Plexus Connect views in IJC can be found on this page). The star icon allows you to bookmark any opened view. The bookmarked view then appears in the Favorite Views section of Plexus Connect dashboard.

Creating views

Plexus Connect provides its embedded form editor to enable users to create their own views (grid views and form views). The Create new view button is available on the dashboard above the search box at the top of the views list. Besides a grid view, a new form view can also be created using the most common widget types (label, single line text field, molecule pane, table, sheet and web browser widget). The newly created view appears in the views list on the dashboard.

Renaming views

You can rename a database view (grid or form), but only if it belongs to your own user account. Shared views can be modified only by the user who owns them. To change the name of a view, you have to:

• Open the form or table;

• Click on the view name and start typing the new name;

• When you are finished, hit Enter or click outside the text editor box.

Moving and resizing widgets

If you hover over the widget in form editor the cursor will change to the "move" cursor type () as a sign that the object can be moved in your workspace. Now to move widget, left click and start to dragging to another position.

To resize widget place mouse cursor to right down corner of widget, click and drag.

Using the table view

Table or grid views provide a tabular arrangement of your data. In a table (grid) view (or in a table widget of a form) you can:

• Resize the rows;

• To reorder the columns of a table, click on the dropdown arrow next to column name and then click on Edit columns option. The Table editor panel will open, where you can reorder position of your columns by drag and drop. Click Save when you finished editing.

• To keep a column of a view visible while you scroll to other columns of the view, click on the dropdown arrow next to column name and then click on Freeze column option. The selected column will be moved left – to the first position of your view. Multiple columns can be frozen one by one and moved right to the previously frozen column(s). Clicking on the Unfreeze column option in the dropdown arrow results unfreezing of the selected column and moving it back to its original position in the view.

Using the form view

Plexus Connect is capable of handling complex forms for displaying your chemical data or even relation data from different database tables connected by relationships. Finding a specific form in this list can be made easier if you start typing the name of the form you are looking for in the text field. As a result, the form list will be filtered to those items only which contain the term you typed.

At present, complex forms can be designed in the Instant JChem desktop application and then opened in Plexus Connect for data browsing, searching, etc. Plexus Connect supports several widget types available in Instant JChem:

• Single line text field

• Multi line text area

• Molecule pane

• Date

• Label

• Browser

• Table

• Multi-field sheet

• Panel

• Tabbed panel

• Histogram

• Scatter plot

• Radar chart

The information displayed in different widgets of a single form is synchronized – if you select a row in a spreadsheet of a form, the corresponding text and structure fields will also be updated on the same form giving you further details about the chosen record.

The selection can be changed on the form widget either by selecting certain rows or by using the record chooser.

The record chooser allows easy navigation among the records of a form. It is especially useful for forms which do not have a spreadsheet widget. It contains four buttons to navigate between the records: first , last , previous and next ; as well as a counter box, where you can enter the chosen record number directly.

Conditional formatting

In version 20.15.0, the conditional formatting feature was introduced in both grid and form views (in form views, conditional formatting can be set for all widgets containing text or numerical values). This feature provides a simple way to analyze a set of compounds based on colored values and identify the most suitable ones. By using conditional formatting, the values are colored based on given conditions to distinguish them visually in the data set. Any color defined in IJC and any set of conditions is supported. To define a color, a color picker can be used. Both background and text color can be easily set by clicking the ‘Background’ respectively ‘Text color’ buttons in the Conditional formatting dialogue window.

The most common example is "traffic lighting" where cells are colored green for “good” (acceptable) values, yellow for “intermediate” (partially acceptable) values and red for “bad” (unacceptable) values. In the following example, the traffic light conditional formatting will be applied to the molecular weight field: molecular weight values lower than 400 will be colored green, those between 400 and 500 yellow and those greater than 500 red. To use conditional formatting, switch to grid view, hover over the header of the Mol Weight column and select Conditional formatting in the dropdown menu. The Conditional formatting dialog will open. By default, red coloring of the cell background appears and a field for operator selecting. Select the ‘>’ operator and specify '500' as the value for the first rule and leave the outcome as 'Red’. This rule means that values are tested and if they are greater than 500 then are assigned to the Red bin of the Traffic Lights rule set. The next two rules can be set by clicking the ‘+’ button at the bottom of the dialogue window: ‘Green’ for operator ‘<’ and value 400, ‘Yellow’ for operator ‘>=’ and value 400 (this means that values failing the previous two tests will be assigned to the Yellow bin).

By clicking ‘Confirm’ the conditional formatting rules are applied to the Mol Weight column.