Scalar 2 User's Guide

Editing lenses

Whether it appears on the Manage Lenses screen or on a lens' standalone page, the lens editor functions in the same way. The editor displays the lens' title at the top left, its various expression components at the bottom left, the number of results it returns in the top right, and an options menu in the bottom right. 

If you have editing privileges for the lens, a number of options are available.

Changing the lens title

You can directly edit the title of the lens in the editor.

Editing the lens expression

The expression is the set of rules that determine what content will be returned by the lens. It's represented by a set of colored drop-down menus, each of which identifies a separate component of the expression.

Expression components

Visualization (purple)

A lens is a dynamic visualization, so every lens expression begins with one and only one visualization component specifying which Scalar visualization will be used to render the results returned by the lens.

Content selections (blue)

A visualization needs something to visualize, and so the second component of every lens expression is a selection of content from the current Scalar project. This is might be a set of specific, hand-picked items, a set of items with the same type, or a set of items geo-tagged within a certain distance of a particular location.

A lens can include more than one content selection, either returning the combined set of all of their results, or only the results that all of the selections have in common. As soon as a second content selection is added, a drop-down menu with both options (combination or intersection) appears at the top of the editor.

Filters (orange)

Each content selection can be modified with one or more optional filters. Content can be filtered by type, by text content, Scalar relationship, distance from a geotagged item, quantity, metadata content, and date last visited. Note that the relationship filter is the only one which can actually expand the content selection, by adding related items (for example, all of the items tagged or annotated by the original selection).

Sorts (green)

Sorts appear after all content selections — they determine the order of the complete set of content returned by the lens. Content can be sorted alphabetically by title, by creation or modification date, by distance from a location, by Scalar type, number of relationships, number of text matches, or by visit date.