The My Ching Tour
Next: Viewing Journal Pages
Journal Search
After launching the application, My Ching always presents
you with a search tab from which you can browse or search for
journal entries. As this tab is basic to navigating to all journal
readings, it is not possible to close.
Journal Selection
Use the journal menu to select the journal you wish to search or browse.
Selecting Relationships journal
(Click on screenshot for full size)
Journal Browsing
By leaving the search input box, blank and clicking the search button, you can browse through all the entries of the currently selected journal.
Sorting all entries by question
(Click on screenshot for full size)
To view the contents of each entry, it is not necessary to keep returning to the search listing tab. All you need to do, is open the first entry, and then you can advance to the next one via the hidden "page turn" button. This button appears when you roll the mouse cursor over the left and right page margins near the journal entry hexagrams. The right hand "paper tag" in the banner area, informs you of the position of the current page within the search results. Naturally, there is a "page-left" button too. You can also turn pages via the Alt-Left Arrow and Alt-Right Arrow keyboard shortcuts.
Turning a page
(Click on screenshot for full size)
Query Notation
My Ching supports a query notation that allows you to
search for every conceivable reading characteristic.
By Key Word
Search the question and notes of all entries in journal by entering a key word/ phrase into the search box. The search results list the question, hexagram received and date, as well as a series of excerpts from the entry text showing where the word/phrase occurred.
By Word Stem
You can also search for the beginning of a word meaning the first three characters or more. Word stems are indicated by putting an asterisk at the end of the first few characters. For example: entering rel* will match the words relation, relations, relative, relevant etc.
By Entry Date
Search by entry day or month, or day/month interval.
By Hexagram Characteristic
Search for nine different hexagram characteristics: See the manual.
By Line State
Search for seven different line state characteristics: See the manual.
Free-form Queries
The ability to write free-form queries is what makes the My
Ching search engine uniquely powerful. Free-form means there
is no limit on how specific you want to make your search query
using the My Ching query notation. To give a somewhat
far-fetched example. Suppose you want to find all entries in a
journal that contain the word boyfriend, but only those
entries entered in the Spring of 2002, or Spring of the following
year, and then only those readings that have exactly one line
changing in the fifth position, and only if the line is yang, and
then only if the fifth line is a ruling line, but excluding any
entries where the main hexagram is number 1, 47 or 64.
For other I Ching journal products this would be impossible, but you can easily do it in My Ching with the following query:
boyfriend 3/2002-5/2002 OR 3/2003-5/2003 nine:5 steps:1 change:ruling -1 -47 -64
Screenshot
The Sample journal of the trial version containing hypothetical job application questions. The query shows all job questions containing both the keyword London and engineer during the year 2002, but only if the hexagram had a changing line in a ruling position.
Filtering by keyword, date, and line characteristic
Repeatable Queries
Once you have entered a query you can repeat it on any journal without having to retype it. Clicking on the down-arrow on the search box will display a drop-down menu of the thirty most recent unique queries. A horizontal line divides the list into queries entered in the current application session, and those from previous sessions.
Search term history
Background Color
Note that the background color of the search results is changeable in the personalization settings of your operating system. For most systems the default is white.
