Contacts imported as links - search seems to miss some contact fields

DEVONthink
1

After importing address book contacts as links, all contact fields are visible in DT3 but search seems to miss some fields. For example, a search for any “Baltimore” does not find contact named “John Doe” with Baltimore as the city in the contact address field.

A search for “Doe” finds this contact link and Baltimore is clearly visible in the address field within DT3.

By contrast, a search for “Baltimore” in the Apple contacts app’s search field instantly finds this contact. Any advice? Thanks.

2

Welcome @diolo

That is a bookmark display information about the contact. The contact information is not in the database, so it can’t be searched. The name search works since that’s the name of the file.

3

  1. Thank you, Jim. Related: and yet a search for “Baltimore” does find some of these bookmark displays. It seems like DT3 considers the Notes field of the contact to be metadata. Therefore if the word Baltimore appears in a paragraph within the Notes field, the search will find that contact link.

  2. It seems that best practice is to continue to consider the Apple contacts app the primary repository for contact info and to search it directly when focused on finding contacts. If there is a way to find everything contact related without having to leave DT3, please let me know.

  3. New contacts added the the Contacts app do not automatically appear in DT3. It seems that to periodically obtain a current list, one has to re-import all contacts and then remove duplicates. I tested this: it works but on my hardware takes about 10-15 minutes to process.

  4. Suppose one wants to associate a contact Jane Doe with a document called Fishing Trips. The steps seem to be: create a “Jane Doe” tag, tag the Jane Doe contact link, and then tag Fishing Trips. The Jane Doe contact link does not automatically generate this tag. If you have a few contacts, you could tag the manually. DT3 has so many capabilities that it is easy to sense that you are missing an obvious way of doing something.

  5. If you have say 5,000 contacts, the solution seems to be to use a script that tags a contact link with its name and run this on all contact links. Otherwise, with no way to associate the contact links (bookmark displays) with other files, what is their use case?

4

Update: Hook combined with DEVONthink resolves the requests mentioned above.