The Proximity Database Browser operates much like a web browser. Most of its functionality is accessed through standard linked (blue and underlined) text items.
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The home page includes a button bar, menu bar, a list of database actions, and set of specific views into the database.
The menu bar provides access to browser settings and Proximity’s query processing, script handling functionality, and model display functionality:
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The File menu controls browser settings and lets you view the contents of text files, such as queries or scripts.
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The Query menu lets you create, edit, and execute queries (see Chapter 5, Querying the Database).
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The Model menu lets you display graphical representations of Proximity models (see Chapter 7, Learning Models).
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The Script menu lets you execute Python commands interactively and in scripts (see Chapter 6, Using Scripts).
The button bar provides access to navigation shortcuts and general browser functionality:
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The Back button returns the browser to the previous page.
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The Home button returns the browser to the Proximity Database Browser start page.
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The Refresh button updates the current display to include any new information.
The location bar provides direct access to any Proximity database entity using a URL-like syntax described in “Using the Location Bar”.
The database actions list provides access to database-level functionality:
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The graph action opens the graphical data browser, which lets you interactively explore the graph structure of the database. See “Visualizing Data”.
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The analyze schema action opens the schema analysis dialog to begin the process of analyzing the distribution of object and link types in the database. See “Analyzing the Database Schema”.
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The browse tables action opens the Proximity NST browser, a tool for examining Proximity’s internal data structures. NSTs are discussed in Chapter 6, Using Scripts. See “Working with Proximity Tables”.
The database views section lets you explore the entities in your database. Objects and links are primary database entities. Exploring these primary database entities is the focus if this chapter. Containers are created as a result of executing queries. Containers and subgraphs, and how to examine them in the Proximity Database Browser, are described in more detail in Chapter 5, Querying the Database.