To enter the browsing modes from the main menu strike b. LifeLines asks you to identify a person or list of persons to browse to:
Please identify person or persons to browse to. Enter name, key, refn or list:
Enter either a name or partial name, or an internal key value, or a user-defined reference key (described later) or the name of a previously defined list of persons (described later), and strike return.
LifeLines allows wide flexibility in how to enter names. You may enter a name in upper or lower case or any combination. You may leave out all but the first given name, and, for given names, you may leave out any letters except the first. You may leave vowels out of the surname, and after four or five consonants have been typed, you may leave them out too. You must separate the given names from the surname by a slash, and if you enter given names after the surname (as in Chinese names), or any modifiers (such as Jr, Sr, IV, etc.), they must be separated from the surname by another slash. Here are a few of the ways I can enter my name:
Example 1-7. Example of entering a name
Thomas Trask /Wetmore/ IV
thomas/wetmore/iv
t t/wetmr/i
th tr/Wetmore
t/wtmr/iv
You may browse to the list of all persons with the same surname by using the * character as the first initial. For example:
matches all persons with surname Wetmore. This is the only wildcard feature supported in browsing. (However, the search operation, new with version 3.0.6, provides some simple wildcards for finding individual name fragments, or searching by user-defined reference keys.)After you enter a name, LifeLines searches for all persons who match. There are three possibilities: no one matches; one person matches; or more than one person matches. In the first case LifeLines writes:
There is no one in the database with that name.and leaves you in the main menu.
If one person matches, LifeLines enters the person browse mode displaying the matched person. If more than one person matches, LifeLines enters the list browsing mode with the list of matching persons.
You may also identify a person by entering his or her internal, cross-reference key value. The internal key values of all person records are an I followed by digits. In the current version, when you enter a key value you must omit the I. If LifeLines finds a person with the key value you provide, LifeLines enters the person browsing mode displaying that person.
The browse command b is also available from most browsing modes. The command works the same way from those modes as it does from the main menu.