Querying

You will often find, when working in PDMS, that you need to check existing information about some aspect of the program’s operations. For example, you may need to find out about any of the following:

• The current usage of the program in terms of users, modules and databases.

• The unique code which identifies the process you are running and the station you are running it from (useful for generating unique work file names).

• The current setting of a command option.

• The contents of part of a particular database; for example, the current setting of an attribute or the list of member elements owned by a specific element.

• The elements which match specific selection criteria that you entered.

Each module incorporates a Query pull-down menu which allows you to ask about some of these topics, the scope of the facility being dependent upon the particular module which you are using. For example, the Query pull-down menu for Design is:

Not all of the querying operations available from PDMS can be accessed using the GUI. For these other (general) options, the QUERY command must be used.