Case-Sensitive Global Searching

DEVONthink
1

How do I perform global searches that are Case-Sensitive?

This search for “Adamant” (including quotes) found the word ‘adamant’:

DEVONthink-British Guiana Indentured Labour — 1987 - benevolent neutrality - indian government policy and labour migration to british guiana-052148
DEVONthink-British Guiana Indentured Labour — 1987 - benevolent neutrality - indian government policy and labour migration to british guiana-0521481307×308 102 KB

This was what I was actually looking for - ‘Adamant’ (in this instance it’s the name of a colonial ship)

DEVONthink-British Guiana Indentured Labour — 1987 - benevolent neutrality - indian government policy and labour migration to british guiana-052150
DEVONthink-British Guiana Indentured Labour — 1987 - benevolent neutrality - indian government policy and labour migration to british guiana-0521501307×308 124 KB

These are my global search options:

DEVONthink-British Guiana Indentured Labour-052152
DEVONthink-British Guiana Indentured Labour-052152582×248 49.5 KB

I know that I can use the search Inspector and review each item in turn, but when I have 30-40 multi-page document hits to then review, it sort of diminishes the level of DEVONthink fun and makes for a very tedious workflow.

Before composing this post I did search for Case-Sensitive searching and found two old posts from 2012…

“Case Sensitive” option in Search

Case sensitive searches ARE very important

Since 13 years have passed since those postings, I thought I should open a fresh post. Apologies if this is not the correct procedure for discussing/requesting features that were the subject of ancient/archived postings.

Cheers

dp

2

Posting here is fine. However, nothing has changed regarding case-sensitivity in searching.

3

Just so I understand. Case-sensitive searches work in file searches but not in database searches? If one needs case-sensitive searches in databases one could try to work with regex as you suggest here? https://discourse.devontechnologies.com/t/case-sensitive-option-in-search/14999/8

4

The database search index is case insensitive.

5

Yes, but it seems like @BLUEFROG is proposing that by using regex and scan text in a smart rule one can get case sensitive search in a database. Seems very clever to me :grinning_face:

6

I guess this technique could be a workaround for case-sensitive searches?

@bjornivarsson I don’t think so. The scan text action is performed on items matched by the smart rule (already search results). Well, I guess it depends on what you’re trying to do.

1 Like
7

I will play around with the smart rule to see what it does.

8

While it‘s doable using a smart rule or a script, it would be really slow in case of larger databases.

2 Likes
9

What is considered a large database?

10

How much RAM do you have?

11

Only 16GB :cry:

12

16GB is better than 8GB, for sure. I would personally say, if you have 50,000 to 75,000+ items, you could consider it large, though Criss may have other ideas.