Operating on Selected List Items on ColorPoint Manager

 

Another powerful tool is right-clicking on a selected item or items. Whenever a list is displayed it is possible to right-click on a selection to perform related actions.

Removing Categories

In the following example three materials have been tagged with a custom category ‘To Reformulate’ to identify items I need to work on. I have now finished with the task and want to remove the category. I do this selecting the items I want to change by holding down the ‘Ctrl’ key and clicking each item in turn. Right-clicking on the selection produces the menu shown below.

Clicking on ‘Remove Category’ produces the following tool providing a list of available categories to remove:

Clicking ‘Ok’ removes the categories from the selection.

Send to Dispense Queue

Any material or formula may be sent directly to the dispense queue on CPC by right-clicking and selecting ‘Send to dispense queue…’

The screen area is disabled and a dialogue box appears requesting details of the required dispense:

After entering the weight required, and adjusting the number of repetitions clicking ‘Ok’ adds the request to the end of the queue.

Create Job

Designs are templates for new jobs. To create a job choose the design, right-click and select ‘Create Job’. This opens a new job, prefilled with the details of the chosen design and ready to be given a unique job number and run length. Once created the values provided by the design may be overridden if required.

Job Lifecycle

Release Job

This releases a job for dispensing.

Un-release Job

This is used to stop a job from being used, generally when changes need to be made to the job. If changes are made to a job without un-releasing and releasing again, the changes will be ignored by CPC.

Complete Job

Mark a job as complete. This removes the job from the active job list, removes it from the CPC job list and indicates that no further work will be done on this job.

Other Actions

The following is a list of other actions that may be invoked by right-clicking on either a single item or a selection.

Open

This opens an item for editing. This has the same result as double-clicking on it.

Delete

An item may be deleted if it is not referenced anywhere. The delete option will appear disabled if this is not true.

Report

This provides a list of available reports for the item. The contents of the list will vary depending on the options enabled in your installation.

Scrap Return

When a return is below a usable weight, or otherwise unfit for further use it may be marked as scrapped. This prevents it from being used in remixing on CPC and being displayed on the list of returns.

Finish (Material Batch)

When a material batch is below a usable weight, or is otherwise unusable it may be marked as finished. This prevents it from being assigned when refilling a tank on CPC. Note: this will not remove the batch from CPC if it is currently assigned. To do this, refill the tank on CPC selecting a new batch.

Filtering and the Filter Panel on ColorPoint Manager

 

The filter panel is one of the most powerful parts of CPM. Using the various search fields it is possible to narrow down a large list of items to a small selection making it easy to find individual items.

Basic Filtering

To display the filter panel click the ‘Filter’ button on the navigation toolbar:

Here is a list of materials, unfiltered:

Typing ‘m’ into the code entry area of the filter panel filters the list to any codes that contain the letter m, in upper or lower case anywhere in the code:

This has removed the entry ‘BN1’ from the list.

Expanding the search further to filter on items containing ‘m1’ results in the following list:

Reverse Filtering

Changing the search type from ‘Like’ to ‘Not Like’ reverses the search, showing only items that do not contain an ‘m’.

Exact Matches

Changing the search type from ‘Like’ to ‘=’ changes the result to an exact match only.

Matching Ranges

Finally, a range of items may be searched by entering the starting search, in this case ‘a’, pressing the ‘To’ button and then entering the ending search. Please note the search excludes the last item in the search range, so that searching ‘a’ to ‘c’ gives items beginning with ‘a’ and ‘b’, but not c.

Checking the Exclude box reverse the search and removes these items from the results:

The same principles apply to searching across date ranges, price ranges and dispense weight ranges.

List Views on ColorPoint Manager

 

The most common view of your system in ColorPoint Manager (CPM) is the List View. Typically you will see Name, Code, Colour (on materials and formulas) and date last modified for the current selection of items. The list view can display all of the entity of your choice, e.g. all materials, or a subset of all entities as filtered (see Filtering and the Filter Panel) by the filter panel, e.g. materials starting with “AB1”. All lists are displayed in pages sized to fit your current window size.

The list view has two main actions:

1. Materials – all materials on the system.
2. Orphaned Materials – materials that are not used in any formulation.

Navigating a list of items

The navigation bar is common to all lists and provides the following functions:

1. Navigate to the first item.
2. Navigate to the previous item.
3. The current page number. Type in a new page number to navigate directly to that page.
4. The total number of pages.
5. The total number of items in the list.
6. Navigate to the next item.
7. Navigate to the last item

Customising a list

Lists may be customised in a number of ways.

1. Changing the columns that are displayed. To do this right-click on a column header and change the selection. Column names with ticks will be displayed. Column names without ticks will not be displayed.
2. Change the order of the displayed columns. Click and drag a column header to a new position, releasing the mouse button when the column is in its new position. To cancel press the ‘Esc’ key before releasing the mouse button.
3. Change the sort order of the data in a column. Click on the header of any column to sort the data by that column. Clicking the header again will reverse the sort order, e.g. 1, 2, 3 will become 3, 2, 1.