Search Variables

Search for variables using facets and full-text query.

Controlled Vocabularies

The controlled vocabularies are the ones defined by the taxonomies and the variable properties. Once a vocabulary term has been selected, it will be used for filtering the variables. Given such a criterion different filters can be selected:

Operation

Description

Any

The variable field can have any non null value.

None

The variable field must be missing.

In

The variable field must be in at least one of the selected predefined values

Like

The variable field must match a query string (with wildcard support)

Not in

The negation of In.

Not like

The negation of Like.

Taxonomies

See Taxonomies Administration documentation. As the number of vocabulary terms can be very large, the interface allows to search for these terms (name, label, description) by providing keywords. These keywords can be negated, for instance alcohol -constructs will look up taxonomy terms containing the word alcohol AND NOT containing the word constructs in its name/label/description (or in the name/label/description of the associated vocabulary).

Properties

The variable properties that can be used are:

Property

Description

project

The project the variable belongs to

table

The table the variable belongs to

name

The name of the variable.

entityType

The type of the entity: Participant, Sample etc.

valueType

The type of the variable values: text, integer, decimal etc.

nature

Nature of the variable: categorical, numerical, logical etc.

repeatable

A variable is repeatable when it can have several values for one entity.

occurrenceGroup

When a repeatable variable is in the same group of occurrence as other repeatable variables

referencedEntityType

When the values of the variable is an identifier, this property specifies what is the type of the referred entity.

mimeType

The mime type of the data.

unit

The measure unit.

script

The variable attribute that holds the derivation script.

The property lookup will be done on the property name or on its possible values. For instance nature will propose to choose among all the variable nature values (categorical, numerical etc.). Whereas typing categorical will propose the categorical nature only.

Results

The resulting variables are presented as a list. To make this list useful it is possible to select some variables and add them to the global Cart. Once in the cart the variables, that could be the result of several search, can be used to search for entities or make a view from them, etc.