Filtering Items

 

Chapter points in this section:

Introduction - the Why and How of Filtering
The Christmas Filter
Selecting Hidden Items
Throwing out the rubbish
Using Filters to choose worship songs
Adding Items to your Session

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Introduction - the Why and How of Filtering

WorshipSession provides access to many hundreds of songs, with new songs easily downloaded from the Internet server. A huge range of songs is at your fingertips, ranging from new to old, and from the popular to the obscure.

But too much choice is not a good thing - although there are more than 1000 songs to choose from, you may only know 500, and perhaps only 200 are regularly sung in your church.

WorshipSession allows you to hide songs you don’t wish to see, and it also allows you to categorise the songs you do use, to make it easier to find appropriate music for a worship session.

Each Item in WorshipSession can have ‘Filter fields’ attached to it, and WorshipSession can be configured to hide or show the various fields. When you press F12 to add a song Item into your Session, you will only see the songs that are not hidden by the Filter.

The Christmas Filter

To illustrate how Filtering works, consider all the Christmas carols and songs supplied with WorshipSession. It is in the nature of Christmas carols that they’re only sung around Christmas, so it’s appropriate to hide them for the rest of the year. That way you won’t see ‘As with gladness’ when you’re looking for ‘As we seek Your face’.

WorshipSession uses two Filters - a hide Filter, and a show only Filter. If you select Christmas in the hide Filter, all song Items that include the Christmas Filter field will be hidden - they won’t be shown when you press F12 in WorshipSession. On the other hand, if you select Christmas in the Show only Filter, all song items will be hidden unless they include the Christmas Filter field.

Selecting Hidden Items

If you want to select a song that is hidden by the Filters (e.g you want to sing ‘Hark the herald’ in August for some reason), use Shift-F12 instead of F12 in WorshipSession. The Filters are temporarily disabled.

Throwing out the rubbish

Every church and group has its own style, and many of the songs in the WorshipSession database may not fit your particular style! There is a ‘delete song’ function in “A3”, but it’s better to use the Filters to hide Items. You can create a Filter field such as Hide, and apply it to songs you don’t want to see. Then configure WorshipSession to hide all Items that have the Hide Filter field.

Using Filters to choose worship songs

In the Song Browser / Item Filters (“C1”) utility, WorshipSession lists all the Items in your song indexes, filtered through the current settings of your Filter fields. It shows the Filter fields attached to each Item. You can use this list to help you select WorshipSongs for a Session.

Adding Items to your Session

You can click on the title of any Item in the list, and see the text of the song in a pop-up window. NOTE: The display in the pop-up window is un-formatted. If the Item contains images, these will not be displayed in the pop-up window. If specific text formatting commands have been applied, the pop-up display may be adversely affected.

At the top of the pop-up window you will see “Click here to add this Item to your Session.” The Item will be added into your Session at the current insert point. You can continue adding Items - when you return to WorshipSession, the most recently added Item will be displayed.