Caller's Compendium

Collection & search

Your collection is your whole library of dances — every transcription you have typed in or brought in from elsewhere. This guide shows you how to browse and sort it, find exactly the dance you want (by words, by the moves it contains, or both), add and tidy up dances, and shape the list around how you work.

Finding your way around these words. On-screen buttons and screens are written in bold — like Collection, Filters, and New dance. The first time a dance term appears it links to the Glossary, so you can get a plain-language definition without losing your place.

If you are brand new here, start with the Getting started guide for a tour of the whole app, then come back for the details.

Browse and sort your dances

Collection is where the app opens. It shows your dances in a single scrolling list that stays fast no matter how large your library grows. Each row gives you the essentials at a glance:

  • the dance title and its author or authors;
  • a formation chip;
  • status and tag chips, when a dance carries them;
  • a rating indicator, if you have rated the dance; and
  • any custom fields you have chosen to show in the list (more on those under Make your own fields).

Wireframe sketch of the Collection screen: a search bar across the top with sort, New, Import, and batch actions; a Filters panel and a scrolling list of dances on the left; and a dance detail preview on the right. This is a low-fidelity layout sketch, not the finished app.

Wireframe sketch of the Collection screen, showing a search bar with New and Import actions, a Filters panel, a list of dances, and a detail preview pane

To change the order, open the Sort control at the top of the list. You can sort by:

  • Title — alphabetical, ignoring a leading "The," "A," or "An," so The Nice Combination sorts under N, where you would look for it.
  • Author — grouped by who wrote the dances.
  • Recently added — newest additions first, handy just after an import.
  • Last called — the dances you have programmed most recently, first.
  • Best match — how well each dance matches your words. This one appears only while you have a plain-text search active (see below), and it is the order the app uses to put the strongest matches at the top.

To open a dance, select it. Its full detail view opens — on a phone as a new screen, and on a tablet or desktop in the pane beside the list. The dance detail view is covered further down.

Group by category (a dance's "vibe")

Many callers think of dances by their vibe — bouncy, flowy, glossy, connected — and organise a card box into those categories so they can jump to a "drawer" and hot-swap a dance mid-evening. Tags are exactly that in the app: give a dance one or more tags for its vibe or category, and they are ready to filter and group by.

Next to Sort is a Group by category control. Pick one tag and the list splits into two labelled sections — the dances that carry that tag, then Other — so a whole category is together in one place. Your chosen Sort still orders the dances inside each section, and picking a dance behaves exactly as it does anywhere else in Collection (open it to read or perform; press and hold to select several). Choose No grouping to return to the flat list.

Grouping is for the current session only: it keeps out of your way next time you open the app, so you always start from your usual order and pick a category when you want one.

Search across your dances

The search bar sits at the top of Collection. Type any words — a title, an author, a phrase from the notes — and the list narrows as you type to the dances that match.

Search understands your dialect wording. If you saved or imported a dance in one set of words and search in another, the app still finds it: searching robins chain turns up the dance even if it was stored using different role names. You do not have to remember how a dance was originally written down.

Clear the search bar to return to your whole collection.

Narrow things down with filters

When you want to slice your library by its properties rather than by words, open the Filters panel with one tap. It lets you narrow by:

  • Type and Formation
  • Progression
  • Author
  • Tags
  • Status and Level
  • a minimum star rating (for example, three stars and up)
  • your own custom fields — the choice, yes/no, text, and number fields you have defined

Two simple rules govern how filters combine, and knowing them makes the panel predictable:

  • Within one filter, choices are "any." Ticking duple improper and becket under Formation finds dances in either formation.
  • Across different filters, choices are "all." Adding an author on top of those formations finds dances that match one of the formations and are by that author.

Filters work alongside the search bar: whatever you type and whatever you tick apply together.

Search by the moves a dance contains

Sometimes you are not looking for a title or an author — you are looking for a shape. Which of my dances have a petronella? Which put a chain right before a swing? Two tools answer questions like these.

Build a figure query with Advanced

Open the Advanced builder to ask about the figures — the moves — inside your dances. It works by stacking up rows and groups:

  1. Add a "has figure" row and pick a move with the type-ahead field — start typing and choose from the matches.
  2. Optionally pin the move to a section (for example B2), so it only counts when it appears there.
  3. Optionally set the move's parameters to be more specific.
  4. Add a "then" sequence to require one move right after another — "a chain then a swing."

Rows live inside All, Any, or None groups — match every row, any row, or no row — and groups can nest inside one another, so you can express questions as detailed as you need.

If you think about dances the way The Caller's Box does — phrase by phrase — open the By-Phrase panel. For each phrase (A1, A2, B1, B2) you can require that certain moves are present ("figures match") or that certain moves are absent ("but do not match"). It is a quick way to say, for instance, "a swing in B1, but no hey anywhere in A."

Everything combines

You do not have to choose one search tool. The plain-text bar, the Filters panel, the Advanced builder, and the By-Phrase panel all apply together — a dance has to satisfy all of them to appear. As you narrow things down, the number of matching dances is announced to screen readers, so the result count is never hidden behind a visual-only cue.

Read a dance in detail

Selecting a dance opens its detail view — the full picture of a single dance.

Wireframe sketch of the dance detail view: a header with title, authors, formation, and level; the figures grouped into sections A1, A2, B1, and B2 with a beats column; and a toggle to switch between your dialect and the neutral wording. This is a low-fidelity layout sketch, not the finished app.

Wireframe sketch of the dance detail view, showing a header with title and formation, a figure list grouped into sections A1, A2, B1, and B2 with a beats column, and a dialect-to-canonical view toggle

The detail view brings together:

  • A header — title, authors, formation, and level, plus a status banner if the dance is flagged (for example, deprecated or broken).
  • The figures, laid out by section (A1, A2, B1, B2), each with a beats column and a marker showing where the progression happens.
  • A wording toggle — flip between your dialect and the neutral, shared wording without changing the saved dance. See the Dialect guide for how this fits together.
  • Calling notes, the choreographer's or your own.
  • A Walkthrough — a dedicated free-text field for the step-by-step teaching notes you say while walking a dance through, kept separate from the shorter Calling notes. If you keep a walkthrough snippet library, it pre-fills here from wording you have used for the same figures before, ready to tweak for this dance.
  • Links — to the source, a video, and related dances.
  • Calling history — which of your programs include this dance. (A Settings toggle decides whether this counts only slots you marked performed or any program that contains the dance.)
  • Custom fields you have filled in.
  • Published-source citation — the book and page a dance came from, when you have recorded it.

One nice touch: when a dance's notes mention another dance by name, that title becomes a link you can select to jump straight to it.

What you can do with a dance

From the detail view you can:

  • Edit the dance.
  • Duplicate it as a starting point for a variation.
  • Add to program — drop it into a program you are building.
  • Print/Share it as a PDF or as plain text. The export follows your active dialect, so what you hand someone matches how they speak — see Share, print & export.
  • Perform this dance — open it in Perform mode, the large-print calling view, to call it on its own.

Add a dance

To put in a dance by hand, choose New dance. This opens the editor, where the title is the only required field. Figure entry is keyboard-first: start typing a move and accept a match from the type-ahead, with a running beat count keeping you honest as you go. If a move is unusual and nothing matches, type it in as free text — it is still recorded as a figure.

Write & edit dances is the full guide to the editor: figures, meanwhile groups, walkthroughs, credits, drafts, and undo. The Getting started guide walks through your first dance step by step. And if you already keep dances elsewhere, you will usually want to bring them in rather than retype them — see Imports & migration.

Make your own fields

Beyond the built-in details, you can track whatever matters to you — a tune suggestion, a "taught it at" note, a difficulty of your own. Choose Manage custom fields to create, edit, and delete your own fields.

A custom field can be a choice list, a yes/no switch, a text note, or a number. Once you define one, it:

  • appears in the dance editor, ready to fill in;
  • can show in the dance list, if you turn that on; and
  • becomes a filter in the Filters panel.

A choice field is a handy home for a reusable pick-list you build up over time — for example the band adjectives you like to reach for (driving, lyrical, punchy). Define it once as a choice field and every dance draws from the same list, so the wording stays consistent and you can filter by it. You do not have to prepare the whole list up front: while editing a dance, use the ＋ beside a choice field to add a new option on the spot, and it joins the shared list for next time.

A few properties lock once a field is in use on real dances, so the data you have already entered stays consistent. The app tells you which ones when you edit a field in use.

Keep your collection tidy

A growing library needs a little housekeeping. Caller's Compendium makes every change reversible.

  • Duplicate a dance to spin off a variation without disturbing the original.
  • Delete a dance and it is only soft-deleted — an Undo option appears right away, and the dance moves to a Recently Deleted area rather than vanishing.
  • Restore or remove from Recently Deleted — bring a dance back, or delete it permanently when you are sure. Anything left there is purged automatically after a retention window, which you can lengthen or switch off in Settings.

Change many dances at once

To organize in bulk, enter selection mode: choose Select dances, or long-press a row on a touchscreen. Tick as many dances as you like, then apply one change across all of them. Tags are on the toolbar; the rest are under More batch actions:

  • Add tags or remove tags.
  • Set level, or clear it with Unspecified (clear).
  • Set rating, or clear it with Unrated (clear).
  • Add tunes — build a short list and add it to every selected dance — or clear tunes, which asks you to confirm first.
  • Set a custom field to a value, or Clear this field.

Every batch change is announced to screen readers and can be undone, and the app tells you plainly when a change would affect nothing. Selected rows are marked with a checkmark and a highlight — never colour alone — so the selection is clear however you are reading the screen.

Jump straight to a dance or program

Anywhere in the app, the search affordance — the search box in the navigation rail on a wide screen, the search action in the app bar on a narrow one, or the keyboard shortcut Ctrl-K (Cmd-K on macOS) — opens a single search box over whatever you are doing. Type, and matching Dances and Programs are listed in groups; choose one and you go straight there.

It searches titles across your collection and your programs, so it is the fastest way to reach a dance you can name. For searching inside dances — by move, by level, by tag — use the Collection search and filters above.

Where to go next

Not sure what a word means? The Glossary has plain definitions for every term used across these guides.