Mission Search Frequently Asked Questions
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A detailed walkthrough can be found in the installation instructions.
Regular expressions can be used in the search string. This provides immense power, but if you’re looking for simplicity, the single-character wild card is a dot (“.”), which matches any single letter, number, or whitespace character. A dot followed by a plus sign (“.+”) can be used to indicate one or more characters. A dot followed by an asterisk (“.*”) can be used to indicate zero or more characters.
Regular expressions can be used to define complex search patterns. There have been whole books published on the subject and there are several good resources available on-line. Here is just a small sampling of what is possible with regular expressions.
Metacharacters
- . (any character, excluding a line break)
- \w (word character)
- \d (digit character)
- \s (whitespace character)
- \S (non-whitespace character)
Quantifiers
- + (at least one)
- * (zero or more)
- ? (zero or one)
- {X} (exactly X occurrences)
- {X,Y} (between X and Y occurrences)
Some examples:
- #\S+#
This search would find usage of any alias in an expression. The regular expression is searching for a string of one or more non-whitespace characters between two hashtags. - \S+\.IGN
This search could be used to find checks for ignored aliases. The regular expression is searching for a string of one or more non-whitespace characters “\S+”, followed by a dot “.”, then followed by the letters “IGN”. In this example, the dot is escaped using a backslash to prevent it from matching any character, since it is the single-character wild card. - TIC(-\d{4})?-\d{3}
This search would find typical references to temperature control loops such as TIC-3100-001 and TIC-222. The regular expression is searching for the text string “TIC”, optionally followed by a hyphen and exactly four digits “(-\d{4})?”, then always followed by a hyphen and exactly three digits “-\d{3}”.
The time it takes to search depends on the file size and the number of hits for the search term. The search may take longer than expected if the application is finding a lot of hits for your search term.
Both reports show the same information, only the presentation differs. The web page report allows you to quickly hide certain rows and focus in on the hits that matter to your current analysis. The spreadsheet allows you to filter, highlight, take notes, and use your favorite spreadsheet functions as you analyze your report.
Clicking “Hide” will temporarily hide that particular row or section of the report. When you reload the page, all hidden rows and sections will reappear.
Each dark gray row is an object that can be found within the control system. Clicking on a dark gray row will hide all hits in that object. For instance, you can ignore all hits from a certain phase by clicking on the “Hide” link beside the dark gray row indicating that phase.
Each light gray row indicates a subsection of the object (e.g. an embedded composite). For instance, if you are not interested in seeing the hits found in the fail monitor, you can click “Hide” on the light gray row to temporarily hide all rows indicating hits in the fail monitor.
Each white row is a hit. Clicking “Hide” in for a white row will hide that particular row.
The Mission Search application processes an FHX file, converting it to XML before searching. This file is saved as an fxml file. If you know that you have already initiated a search on your FHX file in a previous session, you can select to search the fxml file (instead of the FHX file) to avoid repeating the conversion from FHX to XML. If you have selected an FHX file and are doing multiple searches on the same file in one session, the application will automatically skip the conversion after the first search.
If you did not receive your personalized license file from Mission Control Systems or your license is not working, please contact us at software@getmissioncontrols.com.
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