About the display in Globals

DEVONthink Feedback
1

Hi

In the Tags and Trash of Globals, the files associated with a particular tag are displayed. This is very confusing, can you hide it?

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2

This isn’t possible and actually intended to easily view items having a certain tag.

3

This is a feature I use all the time to show the notes assigned to a tag

Just click the down-arrow icon preceding the tagname

4

Organized the behavior of Globals with Tags and Trash.

Tags

  • Changing the tag name in “Globals>Tags” will also change the tag name associated with the file.
  • Deleting a tag in “Globals>Tags” will remove the association with the file (the tag will be moved to the trash).
  • Deleting a file in “Globals>Tags” will remove the association with the file (the original file in the database will not be deleted).

Trash

  • If you move a tag to “Trash” and move it back to “Tags”, the association with the file will be restored.
  • Deleting a tag moved to “Trash” with “Empty Trash” does not delete the original file in the database.
  • Deleting a file in a tag that has been moved to “Trash” will cause the file in the database to be moved to “Trash”.

Is this perception correct? Also, is there any information on this topic written somewhere in the manual or help?

5

Yes.

But there’s one edge case:

  • If you’ve created a record inside a tag
    • and didn’t assign another tag to the record
    • or didn’t replicate the record to a normal group

in prior versions of DEVONthink then the record will be deleted with the tag.

A tag is just a special kind of group, assigning a tag to a record creates a replicant inside this group.

However, this replicant doesn’t show up in Inspector > General > Generic > Instances and you won’t see the symbol that indicates a record’s replicated state in the item list. It’s also not counted in when we ask for number of replicants in an AppleScript.

While being technically a replicant, a tag is not an obvious replicant for the user, which is a good thing.

So, if you’ve created a record inside a tag and didn’t assign another tag or didn’t replicate to a normal group, then deleting the tag will delete the only instance of this record.

If you want to make sure that all records exist in at least one normal group you could use this script. More about deleting tags in this thread .