The collection tab

A collection tab shows the documents of one collection (or view), one page at a time. It opens when you double-click a collection in the connection tree, or select it and press Enter.

Open a collection

1. In the connection tree, expand a connection, a database and its Collections folder.
2. Double-click the collection (or press Enter). The tab opens and shows the first page, in the view chosen in Preferences > General > Default view when opening a collection (Table View unless you changed it).
3. To open with another page size, right-click the collection and choose Open Collection With Custom Page Size….

Opening a collection never counts or scans the whole collection: the first page shows as soon as the server sends it.

Parts of the tab, top to bottom

The Result toolbar

Document editing is described in Edit documents and fields.

The status bar and Count Documents

• On the left: N documents selected (in Tree View: N items selected).
• Count Documents counts the documents matching the current query, in the background. While it runs, the button reads Cancel count; you can also cancel it from the Operations panel. With an empty query, an estimate from the collection metadata (shown with a ≈ sign) appears at once while the exact count runs.
• On the right: the time the last query took, as hh:mm:ss.mmm. While a query runs, the timer shows how long it has been running.

A known count also lets Last page jump straight to the end.

Lock a collection with the padlock

The padlock in the Result toolbar makes the collection read-only for the rest of the session, in every tab on that collection. Insert, edit, delete and field operations are greyed out, and anything that still reaches the engine (a shortcut, a script driving the app) is refused with nothing written.

1. Click Lock in the Result toolbar. Its tooltip reads Unlock: allow changes to this collection’s documents once locked.
2. Click it again to unlock.

The lock is not saved: it ends when you close the application. On a connection that has the Read-Only Lock, the padlock shows locked. Unlocking it there lifts the lock for that tab only, after a confirmation; other tabs stay read-only and the saved connection keeps its lock. See Read-only connections.

Tips

• If you open a collection that already has a tab, that tab comes to the front; use Duplicate Tab for a second one.
• Set default query saves the query bar as this collection’s default; Restore Default Query brings it back and Clear Default Query removes it.
• When a result has no _id (a projection that excludes it), the documents cannot be changed and the tab says why.

Troubleshooting