Search and Find
(available for all extension stages of IQ Software)
If a company is doing risk analysis thoroughly they gather a lot of experience over time which can be used in further projects. The requirement for this however, is that existing knowledge is reused. This again requires that previous knowledge is retrievable. Flexible and powerful tools as provided by APIS IQ-Software are essential.
The simplest and most common method to do so is by selecting text search which is available in all IQ-Software editors and offers a wide variety of additional functions.
Figure 1. Form Text Search
However, a text search is never capable of retrieving contextual (semantic) dependencies. Only if this is possible one can talk of a knowledge based search as it is offered by IQ FMEA.
Since IQ-Software knows about contextual dependencies and uses them for searching, detailed search requests are possible.
E.g.: Search for all requirements with deadline before 1st of May 2009 whose RPN is greater than 225 and whose Occurrence and Detection rating are greater than 4.
Figure 2. Filter example
The software provides more than 50 predefined queries (also called filters) by default.
Figure 3. Predefined filter
The filter pool can be adapted and extended to own user needs since filters can be named and saved and thus be reused at any time.
To search filters are used for two different tasks:
- To filter within the editors to reduce the amount of displayed information.
- Search with the help of the IQ Explorer.
Filter and Highlight
In this case filters are used to keep large amounts of data manageable by only displaying data contents which match with the filter criteria (so to say 'stay' in the filter). All other data is deleted in this view.
- Form before filter application and with a filter which is supposed to filter for Actions in progress:
Figure 4. Form before filter application - Form with a reduced amount of data after filter application:
Figure 5. Form after filter application
Alternatively, you can set the masking aside and only highlight the search results:
- Form before highlight application with a filter which is supposed to filter for the Actions in progress:
Figure 6. Form before highlight application - Form after hightlight and filter application:
Figure 7: Form after highlight application
IQ-Explorer
Search within the IQ Explorer can either be applied to the currently open document or to the whole file system of the currently used computer or linked network resources. The result lists created from the search results can be saved and opened again at a later point. Moreover they can be exported as HTML file or CVS file. Thus, to-do lists, lists for responsible persons etc. can be created fast and be extended over several documents. For example for a company-wide result list for due requirements the responsible persons can be informed via email.
Each reference in the result list can further be presented with contextual information via the so called info table. Printing the described views is of course also possible.
