Since Guardian is used to manage large amounts of data, special consideration has been given
to the problem of presenting this volume of information in ways that are easy to manage. The
data grid is a particularly good way to provide large lists of data and Guardian utilizes them
extensively.
Grids can be thought of as lists of data. The Providers list is an example of a grid:
A typical Guardian Grid
Grids provide several specialized features that make them a powerful data management tool. For
example, they are an excellent way to display very large lists of items in a limited space since
they contain scroll bars ("sliders") that allow the list to be much longer than the available display
space. Viewing the grid above, it can also be easily seen that the presence of an icon beside
some names conveys additional information about them at a glance. In this case, the names with
the yellow icon are inactive while the names with the red icons are expired.
Nearly all list type data in Guardian is displayed in grids and most of them have the capability to
"filter as you type". This feature makes it very easy to find an entry even in lists of thousands of
items. For example, if you were looking for the privilege named "Gram Stains", you could scroll
though the list of thousands of privileges and find it, but you could also click in the grid and start
typing. Each time a new letter is types as part of the word you are seeking, the items in the grid
are narrowed down to match:
Type G
Note that only privileges that begin with the letter G are now shown.
Type R
Note that now only two entries appear, one of them is the Gram Stain privilege that was being
searched for.
As you can see in this example, Filter As You Type is a very powerful feature of the Guardian
grids and can save you a lot of time that would otherwise be spent scrolling through lists.
To clear your Filter As You Type, press the ESCAPE (or ESC) key on your keyboard.
