Reusing Your Queries

One of the great things about the BeOS is how fast and powerful the Find command is. Although you cannot find on the contents of a file, you can search for almost any other criteria, and you can search on extra attributes depending on what kind of object you're searching (more on this in an upcoming tip).

But it can take a minute or two to set up a complicated set of find criteria. It is time-consuming to have to re-create them every time you want to run the same search. Wouldn't it be nice to save your queries, so you could use them again and again?

Well, you can! And it's easy to do, too, because the BeOS actually saves all of your queries for you, automatically. All you have to do is rename them to give each query you want to save a name which will remind you what that query does. Just follow these simple steps:

1. Perform your find, and verify that the query produces the results you expect it to (see the BeOS User's Guide for information about using the Find function to create queries).

2. Open your /home/queries folder in the Tracker.

3. Locate the query file for the query you just performed.

   If you used the simple "by Name" query function, the query file will named "Name = <searchstring> - <datestamp>", where <searchstring> is what you typed into the Find dialog, and <datestamp> is the current date and time.

   If you used the more powerful "by Attribute" query functionality, the query file will be named "Attribute Query: - <datestamp>", where <datestamp> is the current date and time. If you sort the /home/queries window by name, it will be the bottom-most query item that starts with "Attribute Query: - ".

   If you were particularly adventurous and performed a "by Formula" query, then you probably already know everything you need to about queries, and don't need this tip.

4. Rename the query to something that will remind you what it does, like "All HTML Files" or "Mail from Friends".

5. If you wish, move the query file someplace more convenient than the /home/queries folder. Good candidates are the Be menu or the Desktop.

The end result of this process is a file you can double-click and it will "open," showing you all of the files that match your original query criteria. It's like having a custom folder, with all of the right documents in it. Very cool!