A.2.4 Menu Items

This section describes actions available from the Control Window menus additional to those also available from the toolbar (described in the previous section) and those common to other windows (described in Appendix A.1.2).

The File menu contains the following additional actions:

Discard Table
Removes the current table from the list and closes and forgets any view windows associated with it. A discarded table cannot be reinstated. You will be prompted to confirm this action. Discarding a table in this way may free up memory, for other operations, but often will not; whether it does or not depends on the details of where the table comes from.
Export To Mirage
Starts up the external Mirage application on the current apparent table. This action is only available if Mirage is on your classpath. See Section 4.2.10.
View Log
Pops up the Log Window to display logging messages generated by the application. Intended mainly for debugging.

The Views menu contains actions for launching the windows which give certain views of the table metadata. These are all provided as toolbar buttons as well.

The Graphics menu contains actions for launching the windows which give various plotting and visualisation options. These are all provided as toolbar buttons as well.

The Interop menu contains options concerned with interoperating with other tools using the PLASTIC protocol. It is described in Section 8.1.

The Windows menu contains actions for controlling which table view windows are currently visible on the screen. If you have lots of tables and are using various different views of several of them, the number of windows on the screen can get out of hand and it's easy to lose track of what window is where. The actions on this menu do some combination of either hiding or revealing all the various view windows associated with either the selected table or all the other ones. Windows hidden are removed from the screen but if reactivated (e.g. by using the appropriate toolbar button) will come back in the same place and the same state. Revealing all the windows associated with a given table means showing all the view windows which have been opened before (it won't display windows which have never explicitly been opened).

Show Selected Views Only
Reveal all view windows associated with the currently selected table and hide all others.
Show Selected Views
Reveal all view windows which are associated with the currently selected table.
Show All Views
Reveal all view windows associated with all tables.
Hide Unselected Views
Hide all view windows associated with tables other than the currently selected one.
Hide Selected Views
Hide all view windows associated with the currently selected table.
Hide All Views
Hide all the view windows. If you get really confused, this is a good one to select to clear up your screen prior to reinstating the ones that you actually want to look at.
Note that the Control Window item () on menus on all other windows is also useful for window management - it brings back the control window if it's been hidden.

The Joins menu, as well as containing the actions for table concatenation, internal matching and pair matching which are available from the toolbar, also gives you the option to join three or four tables at once by matching rows. The multi-table match windows work pretty much the same as the Pair Matching Window, but with more tables.