Re: Painfully slow searching

vhamberg@xxxxxxxxxxx wrote:

If by auto-open you mean putting a 5 on the Option field, yes, this DOES open the first member found - and every subsequent one when you hit Enter. Plus, if you hit F16, it repeats the search within the open member. You can also put a 2 there - I'm talking about the prompt from the 25 PDM option, not the actual FNDSTRPDM command.

Correct. But it's a rather inefficient way to do things, unless you are actually trying to view every occurrence. If you have 20 members which match, but the only one that really matters is the 18th, then you have to open 17 others, perhaps doing F16 to scan through, until you finally find the one you want.

Contrast this to the RDi technique, where you are presented with all the matches in a single display - every matching member, and not only that, every match *in* every member. You can view the matches, and then click on one to open the member right to that line.

The point is that the two techniques are completely different. The former is for a batch process wherein you need to review every single match. The latter is used to simply get the matches, and then in context decide which one to review. I find the latter a lot better, especially for things like seeing where a field is updated, or how a file is used.

Take the simplest example: finding out where a database field is updated. With a PDM text scan, you will have to open every member and scan every occurrence to find those members that update the field. With RDi, you get a nice concise view of every line where that field appears, and it's easy in context to see whether the field is being updated or not. Which is more productive? RDi, hands down.

Again, I'm not saying that the PDM approach isn't ever useful. I'm just saying that it's not always as useful as the RDi approach. And in my opinion, any process that requires you to repetitively go through every match in every file is a process that might benefit from a different tool.

Joe