There are two kinds of attributes in LifeFlow, which are record attributes and event attributes.

• Record attribute is attached to a record, which contains a sequence of events, to store any information about the record. For example, the gender of the patient or the county in which the patient live.
• Event attribute is attached to an event, which stores the property relevant to the event. For example, the name of the attending physician can be a property of the event "Arrival".

After loading the dataset with the attribute file, the record attributes will be included in the Attribute tab, which can be found in the bottom of the Control Panel. Record attributes can be used to classified the records in a tree manner. Checking/unchecking the checkbox of the attribute display/hide the value of corresponding attribute in the left end of the row after grouping the records by their values. Multiple attributes can be included, where LifeFlow takes the attributes one at a time to group the records into a tree structure.

The distribution of the elapsed time between two adjacent events can be found simply by moving the mouse cursor to the blank area between the two corresponding vertical bars in the Overview Panel. What the measurement tool does is to show the distribution of the elapsed time between two non-adjacent events. The users can select from the distribution after the distribution is shown.

LifeFlow arrange the bars in the Overview Panel with the ranking criteria the users specified. The default setting is to rank the patterns in descending order of the number of records. For example, the pattern having the most number of records with be placed at the top of the panel. The users may switch to another criteria by clicking the radio button in front of the ranking criteria. Also they can change the ordering to be ascending or descending similarly.

In the TimeLine Panel, default setting is to show selected instances on top. The users may uncheck the checkbox so the selected records will not show on top. Note that the selected records are still highlighted, but the users will have to browse the list of records to find them. The ordering of the list follows the criteria specified by the users. A possible scenario to rank the records is to order them by the number of event ICU, which help the users to focus on the patient who went to ICU many times.

The default order is by the record's name. To add other ranking criteria:

Note that the order to apply these criteria can be changed by click the green up/down arrow, which will move the criterion up/down by one place. Clicking the cross removes the criteria.