Pathotrainer

Sometimes you may need to create a case that has slides in different folders, or find a large number of examples of a particular stain, indication, or filetype.

That's where Pattern Search can make your life a lot easier by eliminating the manual searching through all your directories to add them one by one.

If you're not sure how to get to the Cases menu pictured below, first read Create Cases and Case Collections, then come back here.

Then click the “Create Multiple” button.

1. First click the 'Pattern Search' tab at the top of the page
2. Type in your search term, this is the text you will be searching for. The pattern search follows 'regular expression' rules. More information on how to run these is at the bottom of this page
3. Third select the directory you want to run your search in. The pattern search will be applied to every file in every (sub)folder
4. Click 'Select and Preview' to run the search
5. Expand the folder view to see the files your search has yielded
6. When you're happy with the results, click Create. If you want to add/remove files you can edit the case after creation.

If you don't include any special characters, the pattern you type in will be matched against any files containing it. E.g. searching for 'S' will pull up all files containing the letter 'S'.

Regular expression or 'regex' is a series of commands you can use to make very specific searches.

Some examples include:

Using $ at the end of your search term to match the end of the filename, e.g. .filetype_name$ will only include files ending in .filetype_name
Using ^CF to match any string starting with 'CF'
Using ? to indicate subexpressions in your pattern, e.g. “fish(er)?” matches “fish” or “fisher”.

You can learn more about regex with online guides including: https://www.microfocus.com/documentation/relativity/relativity1216/reldbdsn/GUID-7C2DF185-41A1-4448-81E7-3252AA8DEBB3.html

In the screenshot below you can see the $ regex [1] has been used to select only .svs files across many subfolders [2]