ViewFinder: an Object Browser

ViewFinder is a graphical tool for browsing in databases that provides a flexible, yet intuitive environment for exploratory searches. The design approach has been to provide maximum functionality and generality without sacrificing simplicity. The constructs of ViewFinder’s external model are essentially object-oriented: class and token objects, membership relationships between tokens and classes, generalization relationships between classes, inheritance, and so on. This external model is based on an internal model which resembles a semantic network. Such a network may be extracted from a variety of data models, including object-oriented, entity-relationship and extended relational models. This architecture gives ViewFinder a large degree of model independence. The main construct of the external model are displays of objects (either classes or tokens), called views. Commands are available for efficient traversal of the database, displaying views of any class or token. To speed up repetitive searches, views may be synchronized: the user sets up several views, linked in a tree-like structure, so that when the information displayed in the root view is modified (e.g. scrolled by the user), the contents of the other views change automatically. Additional commands are available to search, order, aggregate and select the information displayed in a view, thus providing a simple query facility.