PiMS records are grouped by type. For example, a Target record contains the details for an individual Target whereas an Experiment record contains the details for an individual Experiment.
PiMS provides a means to retrieve and display a List of related records.
This is achieved by clicking the appropriate 'Search... ' link in one of the PiMS drop-down menus or on the 'Home' or an 'Functions' page.

When you click a 'Search... ' link, you will be presented with a table listing the details for all records of the appropriate type.

The example below shows the result of clicking the 'Search Organisations' link from the People & Places Functions page.



There are a number of options available from this page.

• Select a page of Records to view: you can select an individual page of Organisation records by clicking either a page number or the "[Prev/Next]" or "[Next/Last]" links
    -page number 1 is shown in the example, displaying records 1-20
  
  
• Sort Records: you can sort the order in which the records are displayed in the table according to any of the columns.
    -this is achieved either by clicking on the column name, or on the up or down arrows next to each column name.
  In this example, the Organisation records have been sorted alphabetically by \'Name\'
  
  
• View the Record details: you can see all of the details recorded for an individual record by clicking the magnifying glass icon next to the record.
    -see also Viewing a PiMS record.
  
  
• Create a new Record: you can also Create a new record of this type by clicking the link towards the top of the page.
    see Creating a record in PiMS for more details.
  
  

There are some additional options which are revealed by clicking the icon labelelled "Page-display controls"

• Set the number of Records per page: you can set the number of records displayed on a page by clicking one of the page size selectors and then the button.
    -the pager is set to 20 in the example
  
  
• Show row numbers: you can add an extra column to the lhs of the table to display row numbers.
  
  
• Select which columns to display: you can choose which details are displayed by clicking in the relevant boxes and then the button.
    -in the example, the columns diplaying the Fax number, Postal code and the organisation's URL are unchecked and so are not displayed.
  
  

At the bottom of each page you will find the 'Export options' which allows you to export the details displayed in the table in a specified file format.

These include:
  'CSV' -comma separated list
  'Excel' -Microsoft® Excel format
  XML -extensible mark-up language
  'PDF' -Portable Document Format.

Clicking on one of these options will open the default application on your computer for handling this file format.
  -for example, Microsoft® Excel for the 'Excel' format.
  A copy of the file will be saved in the 'Temp' folder on a Windows machine.

There are three places in PiMS where non-standard or custom lists are displayed.
These are:

• Construct management homepage: is a list of all targets recorded in PiMS.
  It is reached either by clicking 'Target' in the horizontal menu bar, or by selecting 'View All Targets' from the Target drop-down menu.
  This list does not have any page display controls or options for sorting and filtering the items in the list.
    -see Construct management homepage for more details.
  
  
• Browse Targets: is a list of all targets recorded in PiMS with their latest progression stage.
  It is reached by clicking the 'Browse Targets' link from the Target Functions page.
  This list can be displayed page-by-page, with user-defined number of items per page, has sortable columns and export options
    -see Browse targets help for more details.
  
  
• Reports: there are 3 Reports:
   'Construct Progress' -a list of all constructs and their latest experiment
   'All constructs fasta' -a list of all construct sequences in Fasta format
   'Experiments Summary' -a list of all experiments ordered by descending date
  These lists can be reached by clicking selecting 'Reports' from the Target drop-down menu. The lists can be refined by entering search terms.
    -see Reports help for more details