The Clear-CAT Material Explorer component enables the user to get an overview of every single product stored in the database before-, during- or after translation.

It basically acts as an repository overview, and visualizes the storage structure of the Clear-CAT® TM, while it is used as the main starting point for 90% of the operations in Clear-CAT®.

Before the material explorer can be activated the proper activity is needed. Similar to the activity which enables the material explorer to manipulate files in the material explorer, a Translation kit creation is linked to a different activity called "Create a Kit".

Selecting the nodes in the material explorer is required to generate summery overviews, and determines where a product is stored in the TM.

The main purpose of the Material Explorer is to provide an graphical representation of all material stored in the Clear-CAT TM. When we refer to material in Clear-CAT we basically refer to the different files and directories which are making up a translation project, so material in this context could be documentation, software, and other contextual information while the structure of the tree can be used to represent localization project related data.

The root or top level of the material tree is the highest level available in the database, so overviews or searches initiated at this level will find everything available in the complete TM.

Each node or branch in the tree is represented by an icon to indicate an element with a specific meaning. The following list is showing all icons and their purpose:

Root or top-level.

Company or Client.

Business unit or Branch office.

Region or Organization.

Site or geographical location.

Target Language.

Product.

Component (docs / software).

Type of material.

Version identifier.

File identifier.

Group of strings (binary | text).

User Interface material (re-sizing dialogs).

Text material.

Image material.

And while these Icon's are specifically created to clarify the project structure there is no restriction in the naming convention assigned by the user. i.e. while the structure is created the name of each branch can be specified according. By default only the root node is available in the Material Explorer when Clear-CAT is activated.

Before the complete tree structure can be listed, the material activity needs to be activated. To open-up the complete tree structure the user has to select the individual nodes of interest by the small [+] signs in front of the Icons. To close an already open structure the user will need to click the [-] sign. To preserve system memory, material located in a specific branch is only loaded after the branch is selected and the user has clicked the [+] sign. This explains the message indicating the number of nodes it is loading from the server, when a node is opened.