Inserting/Deleting Items

By Sandra Schloen, December 2014

Items within OCHRE are typically organized within Categories of data and arranged in meaningful hierarchical groupings. In some cases the organizing hierarchy has a containment structure that represents the strict nesting of items within other items; for example, an archaeological excavation context within the Locations & objects category. In other cases the hierarchy is just a convenient organizational structure for organizing, say, images within folders in the Resources category.

Inserting and deleting items within hierarchies works the same across all of the categories of data. The main toolbar provides a variety of ways to insert and organize items.

OCHRE toolbar

Inserting items

  • The first insert button, the insert-within button (highlighted above), inserts a New item within the context of the currently selected item, and at the end of any existing sub-items.
  • The next two insert buttons insert new sibling items either directly above or directly below (respectively) the currently selected item. This is useful for inserting a limited number of items near their sibling items in a long list of sub-items.
  • The insert button with an asterisk is the insert-N button which will insert a specified number of new items following the currently selected items. This is useful if you have a lot of items that are similar and you want to make a number of similar copies of them. For example, you may have entered a coin, and now you have 7 more just like it. You can enter these extra 7 quickly by using the insert-N button and requesting 7 copies.

Deleting items

The currently selected item, or a selected range of items, is deleted by clicking the delete ("x") button. OCHRE will check to make sure that the item being deleted is not used in any links to any other items. If another item is found to depend on this item it will not be allowed to be deleted; the link dependency will be listed, and will need to be removed first. Otherwise, simply confirm the delete operation.

Refreshing items

OCHRE tries to retain in memory items that it has fetched from the online database in order to minimize traffic to and from the database. But sometimes you will want a fresh copy of an item. Simply click the Refresh button (circled here in blue) to force a fresh copy of the item to be fetched from the database.

Your turn

  • Select the Middle East hierarchy under Locations & Objects and use the insert-within button to add an item representing the country of Syria. With the new Syria item still selected, use the insert-within button again to add an item representing the town of Aleppo. Re-select the Syria item to be the containing parent again, and add an item for the city of Damascus.
  • Use the insert-below (or the insert-N-below button) to add Greece (or any other number of Middle Eastern countries).
  • Use the up and down arrow keys (underlined here in red) to order the countries which you added; alternatively, go to the Preferences tab and Sort sub-items using the Alphabetical sort option.
  • Return to the Middle East hierarchy item and click the Refresh button (circled here in blue).
  • Use the Delete button to delete one of your extra countries. (Retain the Syria branch for use later on in the tutorials.)

Inserting a new item