Filter System

From PhexWiki

You'll likely find Phex' filter system pretty easy, once you've gone through the process.

This page is just a brief 'walk-through' to help get you started.

To begin, let's imagine that you've searched for music videos using the name of your favorite musician or group - but the number of results you got back is pretty large. After downloading a few of them, you might decide that the smaller files aren't worth bothering with. So what we'll do first is show you how to create a 'negative' filter; that is, a filter that blocks some search results. In this case, we'll set an arbitrary limit of 1 megabyte: anything smaller than that will NOT be displayed.

First, make sure you have the Search Filter Options area displayed. If it isn't visible, you can bring it up by selecting View|Search Filter from the menu.

From the Search Filter Options area, select the Edit Rule button:

This will bring up the Advanced Search Rules dialog, which is the beginning of a 'wizard'. What we want to do is create a new rule.

Click on the New Rule button, and you'll be shown another dialog - the Rule Wizard

Since the rule is going to be a 'negative', just click on the Next button so you can tell Phex what you want it to do.

Since you don't want to be bothered with the too-small files, you would select 'hide them'

Click Next, and you'll be given the choice of what kinds of things you want hidden. In this case, we want to filter out files of a certain size:

To set what size we want to filter on, click on the 'in a specific range' text, which is underlined. You'll be be shown a dialog box where you can set whatever file size limits you like. In our case, we don't want to see anything smaller than 1MB, so we'd enter a '1' in the text area, and select 'MB' from the drop-down next to it.

Note that a MB is the binary 1,024 KB, NOT 1,000 KB!

After you're satisfied with the file size limit(s) you've entered, press enter so you can give the filter a name (something that describes what it does), and whether or not you want the filter to be used by default. In this case, 'permanently' means 'by default'; once you start a search, you can turn on/off any rules that you've set up. If you expect to use a rule a lot (such as filtering out things like spam), you'll obviously want to enable the filter rule 'permanently'.

When you're done, click on the 'Finish' button, Apply the rule, and you're good to go!

---

You can also use the filter rules to explicitly select additional conditions, such as limiting your results to JUST videos, and nothing else. Note that if you let your cursor hover over the different types, a small popup will be displayed that shows the associated file extensions that will be used.

Be aware that filter rules are 'additive': if you enable the '1M' filter AND the 'videos only' filter, you'll only see files that are larger than 1M AND videos. Try enabling/disabling the filters to see the effects for yourself. If you search for a variety of different things, you might want to create a number of small, simple filters so that you can use them in various combinations, as opposed to having a few filters that are more complex.

If you like, you can filter results based on words or phrases that appear in the 'file' column:

Of course, you can edit the filters by simply clicking on the underlined 'condition values'

Hopefully, this page has helped you understand how to create and use the filtering rules available in Phex. Go ahead and try creating different rules, then seeing what the effects are on your searches. If the filter rule doesn't quite do what you want it to, you can always delete or modify it! :-)