I am new to DEVONthink - just 6 days into my free trial! This question might have been asked before. I want some date fields from metadata but do not need for all documents. If I select from and to dates for example I would need them for a bank statement but not for an actual letter from the bank. The default dates shows as 1/1/2001 but there seems to be no way to make this a blank field for documents where I do not need the date or to mark it as not applicable in some way. I might be missing something as I am new to DT but decided to join this group to find out more.
Welcome to DEVONthink. I hope your trial is successful in you making a decision one way or the other to use or not use DEVONthink.
There are lots of different date fields in the list of “meta data”. Some dates like Date Added and Date Modified are never blank as they have to tell the truth about those details when the file is entered into the DEVONthink database.
What date field are you having problems with? How is the date field created–can you tell. Some sort of smart rule or something?
The first date I tried adding myself through Custom Metadata was Date Paid. I clicked Settings/Data then the plus sign at the bottom of the Custom Metadata list - it said “New” so I changed it to “Date Paid”. I then clicked “Type” where it currently said “Single-line Text” and selected Date from the drop down menu. On the next menu it was showing the “Type” as “Date” and I clicked the “Format” to be just “Date” and not “Date & Time” as I wasn’t bothered about the time. The “Date Paid” then showed up in the Customs Inspector for my document and was pre-seat 1/1/2001 so I changed it to the correct date for that document. I discovered on my next document which wasn’t something that required payment that I couldn’t blank out the date. I understand that Date Added and Date modified can never be blank but I thought optional dates like "Date Paid’, “Date From” and “Date To” which only apply to certain types of documents would have the facility to leave blank for documents where they are not required. As I said I am new to DEVONthink so I am maybe missing something simple.
A second welcome @DevMo25
If you are creating custom metadata with a Date data type, the macOS controls shown in the Custom Info inspector will always show some date, whether it’s set by you or not. It’s actually called a date picker, hence it’s always reporting a date.
Thank you for your reply. It looks like I can’t do what I want to do then. Just to explain I am coming from a background of using Mariner Paperless but they have gone out of business. Under their system you selected a document type eg, Payslip and then selected the metadata you wanted to show for that particular type of document which would be different from the metadata you wanted for something like a bank statement. Is there any facility to do this within DEVONthink? Like I said I am extremely new at this and haven’t gone all the way through the DEVONthink
manual to explore the possibilities.
Metadata is always for all documents, in all databases. Regardless if it’s predefined or user-defined. But you can use the name of a record to indicate eg a single date or a range
Thank you for your suggestion. I notice that the Properties Inspector also has a field called “Title” which I felt was a bit confusing as the name was also really a title but maybe the Title field could also be used to indicate a special date or range of dates.
I ran into the default date thing when setting up a field for task due date
My solution is to use a custom metadata field defined as text
which allows blank (or other text like Someday/Maybe)
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Thanks so much - that suggestion worked beautifully. I created a “Date Range” custom metadata field and also a “Date Due” so I can fill them in when a document needs them and just leave blank for everything else.