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Screening Assistant 2 v1.1


Graphical User Interface (GUI)

Last edited: 02/11/2011
By: VLG
Sourceforge: SA2 website
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This page will provides fairly comprehensive overview of the Graphical User Interface (GUI) of SA2. You will learn how windows are organized, how actions are arranged in menus, and which are the main windows you will work with...


Table of Contents

  1. General overview
  2. Menu Bar
  3. Toolbar
  4. Viewing single molecules
  5. Viewing multiple molecules
  6. The Selection window
  7. Database management windows
  8. Other windows



General overview - top

There are three main areas in the GUI: the Menu bar, the ToolBar and the main Desktop area. All windows will be displayed in the Desktop area. Their relative position can be changed however you like by dragging and dropping windows into different locations.

Once you open a database, a set of windows be opened and positionned automatically. When running SA2 for the first time, a default layout will be setup.You can of course rearenge the position of all windows. The following screenshot shows you an example of what we use in our lab.

Create a new database

Note that when you close SA2 and reopen it, the previous layout will be setup.




Just like usual desktop applications, the menu bar contains shortcuts to all available features in SA2. The most important menus are the following:

There are also other less important menus:




Toolbar - top

The tool bar is just a set of shortucs to windows / actions that are usually used. Pass your mouse over each button to get a short description of the underlying action.

Only two things are worse to note:

  1. The very first button allows you to disconnect from the current database (and therefore close all currently opened windows), and open the connection window.

  2. You probably noticed a text field in the middle of the toolbar. This text field allows you to perform simple name-searches. Type a name (or the part of a name) in the field, and press Enter (or the button on the left of the text field). A window will open in the central area of the GUI, showing the results of the search.



Viewing single molecules - top

There is a set of windows available to display the information related to a particular molecule that would have been selected in whatever other window. Because we are not necessarily interested in ALL information available for each molecule, and because we have a limited place on our screen, we decided to create various views that can be opened or not to display a particular information on a selected molecule. Here they are:




Viewing multiple molecules - top

There is also of course a set of windows that allows you to view more than one molecule. In all these view, when you select a single molecule, all the views will be updated to display the information associated with this particular molecule. When you select multiple molecules, another selection mecanism is used, making use of a particular window called the Selection window. Although it can be viewed as a window allowing to view multiple molecules too, we will descibe it later in a dedicated section.




The selection window - top

In simple table as well as in various plotting facilities, you have the possibility to select interactively one or several molecules. When doing so, the full list of selected molecules will appear in the Selection window, usually located in the right of the main SA2 window. There are two important things to highlight on this feature.

Create a new database

Synchronize the selection

As shown in the previous screenshot , a small checkbox makes it possible for the selection process to be synchronized. It simply means that when a set of molecules has been selected in a particular view, all other views will be notified that the selection has changed, and will select these molecules in their own view.

Please be carefull with this. Don't expect the selection process to be very fast if you are displaying hundreds of thousands of molecules in e.g. a simple property plot.

Do something with selected molecules

On the left of the Selection window, you can see a set of buttons. These buttons allow you to perform some action on the set of molecules that are currently selected and displayed in the Selection window. Currently, you can add these selected molecules to a given library, create a new library based on these molecules, or delete these molecules.

Note that if you don't select any particular molecule in the Selection window, all the molecules listed will be considered in the action you will trigger. If however, you have selected one or several molecules in the list, only these molecules will be considered. This is also true for all the search results windows.




Database management windows - top

Various windows allow you to perform administration or even more advanced operations on your database. These windows are available in the Database menu. They usually represent the information as simple list / tree.

In each case, a left click on each entity will popup a menu that will allow you to perform various operations. In most cases, a Properties menu-item will also be available, in which you will be able to view basic information and even edit some of them (e.g. names, descriptions...).




Other windows - top

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