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Navigating Within CEDAR

Introduction

Navigating around CEDAR is pretty easy, but it helps to understand a few basics.

CEDAR (the "CEDAR Workbench") has 3 tools:

  • the Desktop (which includes your workspace),
  • the Template Editor, and
  • the Metadata Creator.

The Components

For managing CEDAR content you'll use the Desktop, which can either display a Workspace, or search results. (More on search results below.)

When you want to create a template, element, or field, you will use the Template Editor. This is a form-building tool that lets you drag-and-drop form components.

To fill out a form, you'll use the Metadata Creator, which lets you edit and save metadata, and view it in JSON-LD or RDF.

Browsing in the Desktop

When the location bar is shown at the top of the Resources box, you can click on any of the highlighted components of the location to go to that folder.

In any Desktop view, if you want to navigate into any of the folders that are listed, double-click on the folder. (You can also use the resource menu (⋮) and click on Open.) This works in either search or browse mode to display the contents of folder in the Desktop.

Note that when My Workspace is the selected viewing mode (see Your CEDAR Workspace for more details on viewing modes), you only see resources at the current folder level. In either of the Shared views you will see all the folders and artifacts that explicitly satisfy the chosen criteria.

Moving Back and Forth

From the Desktop, you'll move to one of the other tools by opening an artifact or populating metadata for a template. Once in the Template Editor or Metadata Creator, you can't perform any Desktop functions. The only way back to the Desktop is via the CEDAR back button in the upper left of the template or metadata instance. Think of these tools as 'modal overlays' on the Desktop view—they replace the Desktop view until they stop.

The Desktop can also move into a search mode, either by entering a search string in the search bar, or by selecting the Shared with Me or Shared with Everybody search links from the left side. In these modes, the current location is not shown above the Resources box, but is replaced by a string indicating what information is being shown. To return to the Desktop from one of these search modes, you can click on the Workspace link at upper left.

Key Tip: If you open another tool (by opening an artifact) from the search mode of the Desktop, clicking on the left arrow in the CEDAR window will return you to your last Desktop location, not to the search interface (with the previous results in it). To return to your previous results in the search interface, click on the browser back button.

When searches or folders contain a lot of content, CEDAR uses paging to quickly display the first set of results (usually 100 results). In this case, if you search for content via the browser, you may not see it if it has not been paged into view. You can see from the Displaying i of j message at the bottom of the screen whether more results are available.

To display more results, scroll the list by using the faint scroll bar on the right of the list, or using your computer's 'swipe' gesture to move the list upward. You may have to repeat this gesture several times to see all the content. You'll know all the content is displayed when the final message reads Displaying j of j.