Selecting files in the database [TODO]

Authors: Francois Tadel

When you have lots of files in a folder, like multiple source reconstructions of time-frequency files for each trial, it is difficult to grab just the ones you are interested in. Two mechanisms can help you: the Filter box and the process "File > Select files with tag".

Filter text box

You want to select only the averages in the data files in the protocol TutorialRaw. Drag and drop all your files there, then use the Filter search box at the bottom-right of the Brainstorm window. Type the string "Avg" to keep only the files that contain this string.

allFiles.gif

The options offered in the Filter menu are:

Select files with tag

You can get to the exact same result by adding the process "File > Select files with tag" before the process you want to execute, to keep only a subset of the files that were placed in the Process1 list. It is less convenient in interactive mode because you don't see immediately the effect of your file filter, but it can be very useful when writing scripts.

selectFiles.gif

To see the list of files that was selected by the process, you can open the report viewer (File > Report viewer). This lists the input files (all the files) and the final files (the selected files), with a summary of how many files where selected on the top.

selectReport.gif

After

This process is useless if it is not followed immediately by another process that would do something with the selected files. An application can be the deletion of some files, by adding the process "File > Delete files".

How to control the output file names

If you are running two processes with different parameters but that produce exactly the same file names and file comments, you wouldn't be able to select them with this process. But immediately after calling any process, you can add the process "File > Add tag" to tag one specific set of files, so that you can re-select them easily later.

Example: you run twice the time-frequency decomposition with different options on the same files, tag the files after calculating them with different tags.

addTag.gif

Select files from the pipeline editor [TODO]

Select subset [TODO]

SelectFiles (last edited 2015-11-17 21:34:41 by FrancoisTadel)