1.3.1 Searching in SPIN

1.3.1      Searching in SPIN

When you are working with SPIN, you are always working with the entire data volume, when you are searching. You can press the “Show all” button if you want to see all data, but you do not necessarily have to press it before you start searching.  The search function works through a search mode. By pressing the “Search” button, the search mode is activated, and all searchable fields in the actual tab or window that you are working in are blanked. You can navigate between the activated fields on the actual tab by pressing the tabulator key.

When you are in search mode there is a drop down menu next to each of the searchable fields. To carry out the search, you simply fill in search criteria in one or more of the activated fields, select the conditions in the corresponding drop down menu and press the  “Search SPIN” button. Then the search will be carried out to find the registrations that meet all the criteria you have entered. Please note that you can only enter search criteria in the activated fields of the actual tab you are working with when you entered the search mode. Changing tab while beeing in the search mode brings you back to the viewing mode.   The searchable data fields in SPIN can either be numeric strings or text strings. The fields accessible for numerical searching are “CAS-No.”, “EC-No.”, “Year”, “Total use”, “Tonnes”, “Code” and “#prep”. All other searchable fields are text strings. To learn more about numerical searching please refer to “1.3.3 Searching in SPIN – using operators and ranges”. If you select the condition “equals” and for instance enter “aluminium” in the “Name” field, you will get all the substances that contains “aluminium” as an isolated word in one of their names, such as “OXO-(STEARATO)-ALUMINIUM, HOMOPOLYMER” or “Aluminium hydroxide sulfate”. If you select “not equals” instead, you will get all the substances that do not contain “aluminium” as an isolated word in one of their names. A word is defined as alphanumeric characters in a string divided from other strings by any special character as space, parenthesis, comma, hyphen etc. Please note that the search function does not make any distinction between upper- and lower-case.   If you fill in “alumi” in the “Name” field and select “contains”, you will get the records of all substances that contains the text “alumi” or “ALUMI” as a part of a word in the name of one of their synonyms, for instance the aluminates. Selecting “does not contain” will bring you the opposite result.   If you select one of the conditions “begins with” or “ends with” and fill in “alumi” in the “Name” field, you will get all the substances that contains isolated words in one of their names, that either begins or ends with “alumi”.   When you have finished a search within one of the tabs “Main info”, “References” or “Technical”, the number in the far right of the heading will tell you how many substances you have found. The records of the found substances are “stacked” with the record of the substance with the lowest CAS-No. in the top. You can look through the found records by pressing the arrows in the right of the heading or you can press the “List” button to overview the names and the CAS-No.’s of all the found substances. From the list it is possible to select the record of the substance of your particular interest by simply pressing the underlined CAS-No. From the selected record you can return to the list by simply pressing the “List” button again.