Search and See also with multiple data bases

I am confused about search from a main window, search window (from Tools), See other, and multiple open data bases.

  1. What works across open data bases? Also, is there something that has to be done to specify “all” the data bases, rather than just the one one is in?

  2. When doing a search within a main window, the preview/edit pane shows the sorceror’s hat for Show Other. But, so far as I can tell, it doesn’t look at “other” data bases. Should it? How?

  3. When doing a search from the search window under Tools, I see that it looks across data bases. However, how does one then employ the See Other feature?

I suspect that there is a little primer on the website or forum to disentangle these matters, but–if so–I haven’t found it. Nor did I find the manual helpful on this. And it’s the end of the day. Explanation or the right pointer would help.

1° Tools > Search > Search in (in the “search options” navigator): you will have the chance to select one or all of the open databases to search in.
While 2° Main window > Search field (in the toolbar): you will only be able to search in a single database = the one you select among the open databases listed in the navigator.

Similar answer.
1° Tools > Search > (search results) > Context: it will list contextual items of all the open databases (even if you have searched in a specific one).
While 2° Main window > Search field > (search results) > See also or Classify (the hat): it will only search correspondances in the database you have searched in.

As far as I know, in that window, the “See also” feature is not available (only “Context” - see above). The trick is to select and open, in a new window, one of the documents listed in the results list and you’ll get back the “See also” feature for that document.

Hope it helps a bit and may be, more advanced users will complete :slight_smile:

Thanks, that helped.

Upon reflection and further experimentation, it seems that:

  1. One can search across data bases with the Tools/Search

  2. Having found an interesting item, one can open a new window for that item’s database and manually copy the link to the item into the search field of that new window. The same document will show up, of course, but the See Also and Groups panes will be present. These, however, point out relations only with the particular database.

This raises two questions:

  1. Should it be easier (or is it easier) to do step 2 (perhaps with a contextual option to go to selected item’s data base)?
  2. Should it not be straightforward to have the See Also optionally do a meta search across databases? If each database is indexed, one might think that each of the special DT files for a database could be made available for a global search. I haven’t seen this discussed but I’m not sure what to search for. In a terribly crude approach, one could do the search from Tools/Search, go to the first “other” database that shows up, do the See Also thing in that database, copy the list of items found to a file; go on to the next database, etc. Then one could concatanate the lists.