Querying Oasis Databases (Conditional Operator)

Oasis montaj provides a mathematical expression called the "Conditional Operator" that provides means of performing complex mathematical expressions and queries on channels in an Oasis database.

For example, if you are working with a single column of data, you can quickly identify all values that are above or below certain thresholds and copy these to another channel where they can then be manipulated further or plotted on a map. Or, if you are working with multiple columns of data, you can compare values between columns and then copy results from one of the channels to an output channel for further manipulation and plotting.

The Conditional Operator is quite powerful in that it can handle numeric or alphanumeric data and can include complex sets of expressions for evaluation.

The general form of this operator is:

exp1?exp2:exp3

Where:

Expressions can be constructed with any of the functions or operators summarized in Rules for Defining and Applying Mathematical Expressions.

For example, to evaluate a single channel for values above an arbitrary level, say 1000, copy values greater than 1000 into another channel and substitute a dummy value for values that do not meet the query criteria.