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Introduction

WinCan VX includes a whole pile of filtering tools that most regular users never touch, and it can become quite painful watching them try to find and locate bits and pieces of data in their projects manually, and without ever going anywhere near the tools that are at their disposal in all editions of the software.

These filters exist in WinCan VX and in WinCan Map and can be transferred between the two with ease.  When it comes to HADDMS WinCan projects imported from shapefiles for round-tripping, there are usually simply too many assets to go manually searching for items, and once you become fluent with these tools, you will most likely wonder why you never used them before in regular CCTV projects.

There are four main filter types in WinCan VX, but their behaviour is mostly unified in that although they may be accessed from different locations of the user interface or different buttons, they all basically work from the same code base behind the software.  They are:

1. The User Filter.

2. The Quick Filter.

3. The Column Filters.

4. The Multi-Select Tool.

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The User Filter

The User Filter is the most powerful filter tool available in WinCan VX.  It allows you to filter data on any available field in the current view and it allows you to save and recall filters that you use regularly.  The downside is that it requires the most mouse clicks to operate.

1. By default, WinCan VX loads a predefined set of section filter fields that are useful in some territories, but don’t really help us with HADDMS.  The first thing you need to do is simply click on the bin icon on the right-hand side of each line to clear these filters out of the way.  Now, you can define your own filter criteria by selecting a Column ID in the first field (these match the field headings in the section/node header), an Operator action, and a Value.  Advice – choose the Operator carefully because being smart with this can be really helpful in making simple queries quickly.

2. Use the tools across the top of the panel to create your own filters, save them and reload them in the future.

3. Always consider this area very carefully. There are two options available in the drop-down list, All and Any.  The choice of selection here affects all of the query lines that you define.  The most common option to use is ‘Any’ which is not the default option.  These two values have a serious impact on the results of the filter query, and they can be assumed to mean ‘All’ = ‘And’ and ‘Any’ = ‘Or’, so depending on which one you chose, you may be filtering on say (and the results will be very different):

   1. All: Diameter > 150 and Shape = Circular.

   2. Any: Diameter > 150 or Shape = Circular.

4. The green plus button allows you to add new lines to the query builder if needed.  In most ‘typical’ user defined filters, there is seldom a need to go past 3 lines if you are filtering smartly, but this is entirely your choice.

5. The magnifying glass gives you a quick preview in VX of what the filter will look like when it is activated.  Using the filter will never remove or delete your data, it will only every hide the items from view that you have filtered out.

6. The funnel button will show you how many records will be displayed when you apply the current filter.  This can be useful because usually you should have quite a solid idea of what the filtered result will look like, and maybe if you have created a filter that should return say 2 records, and the funnel says 553 records, then you should go back to your query setup and reconsider it (maybe you have ‘Any’ set and it should be ‘All’?).

Click the green tick to apply the filter and return to the VX interface.  After you have applied the filter, the ‘Apply User Filter’ button in the ribbon bar will be highlighted orange and the section/node grid view will be yellow.  These are the clear indicators that a filter is currently applied to the data.  Simply click on the orange ‘Apply User Filter’ button to clear the filter:

In the above example, we have used the filter to select all objects where;

• the SUPP_REF is ‘like’ ‘.X’, so this finds every SUPP_REF that has the characters ‘.X’ in it, and

• the Pipe Diameter is greater than 150mm.

Which gives us 3 results.  In this test project, if we change the Filter value to ‘Any’ then it finds all objects where the SUPP_REF is like ‘.X’ or the diameter is greater than 150mm, and there are 358 results, not 3.

The Quick Filter

The Quick Filter is a more straightforward way to make quick and easy filters on the data without opening a separate panel with multiple options:

This filter has a number of predefined options in the first field at the top, and then some sub-options in the ‘Available Criteria’ field, but in the normal way as has been described already, when a filter is applied form here, the buttons turn orange and the grid view turns yellow, so it is really obvious when a filter is currently being applied, and clearing the filter is also very easy by clicking the orange button in the ribbon.

The Column Filters

The Column Filters (or Funnel Filters due to the shape of the icon) are available on every grid column in the user interface, so they can be used on sections, laterals, observations, node parts, node entries etc.

They offer a quick and easy way to make a filter based on;

• if the field is blank,

• if the field is not blank,

• a single value in the column, or

• a selection from the User Filter.

This tool provides a very quick and easy way of filtering data in a column and can be combined with other filters, so maybe you already have a User Filter or Quick Filter applied on the data, then you can also add a Column Filter as well to further fine-tune the results.

The Multi-Select Tool

The Multi-Select tool was primarily created for helping to delete multiple selected items from any grid view, but more recently, it has become more dynamic in that it is now a filter, which can still be used for deleting items.

To activate the tool, click on the small icon with 2 folders and a green tick in any of the grid views as shown in the image at the top of this section, and you will immediately see the column of checkboxes down the left-hand side.

From here, you can select the checkbox right at the top to ‘Select All’ items, or you can select individual items that you wish to perform an action on.  As with all the filters in WinCan VX, the Multi-Select tool can be compounded with other filter types to drill down onto your data.

Once you have made the selection, you can use the delete icon in the bottom-right of the grid view, or you can carry out other post-processing actions as described previously.

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