Converting indexed group tags to ordinary tags?

DEVONthink
1

I’m moving a database away from group tags and want to use ordinary tags. I’ve switched the “Exclude groups from tagging” setting to ON at the database level. When dragging all the indexed groups to the “Tags” item they show up as tags, but they still are of kind “Group” and have a path set (and the little Finder icon).

How can I ‘convert’ and indexed group tag to an ordinary tag?

2

Enabling Exclude groups from tagging, enabling Inherit tags of groups and finally adding the desired tag to the indexed group should be sufficient.

3

When I drag an ordinary tag in a database which has Exclude groups from tagging disable, to a group it stays an ordinary tag (when checking Kind). I would expect that it would ‘become’ a group instead. It wouldn’t be really problematic as practically it seems to make no different, but e.g. sorting in the sidebar now seems wrong (tags are beneath groups). Is this expected behavior? Is there a way to change an ordinary tag to a group tag?

4

Yes, that’s the correct behaviour and no, there’s no such way.

5

Thanks. It seems inconsistent with the documentation which defines tag types as follows:

Constant Description
group tag A “group” tag located outside of the tags group.
no tag No tag (not a group or excluded from tagging).
ordinary tag An “ordinary” tag located inside of the tags group.

I’ve got 2 tags: TagA, TagB:

  • TagA is a group I’ve created outside of the tags group and the group is NOT excluded from tagging, thus it is a group tag. It’s listed as “Group” in the List View
  • TagB is an ordinary tag I’ve created in the tags group and then dragged to a group tag in the database. It’s listed as “Tag” in the List View (not Group as I expected!)

When I check with Applescript both tags (tagA and tagB) are of tag type group tag. If a group tag would mean “a tag located outside the tags group”, wouldn’t it be more logical if tagB would then be of kind Group? Now it seems everything is decided based on where the tag is created not where the tag is located

6

Both tags are located outside the Tags group (although it’s unclear whether you moved or replicated TagB). And therefore the type returned by AppleScript is correct. The kind shown in the user interface might be an old cached value, does restarting the app fix the kind?

7

That’s it indeed - restarting fixed it.

It is doing what I actually expected - when dragging a tag from the Tags list to a Group it becomes a Group [Tag] - which makes sense. It just seems that when doing that - it uses a cached value and only shows that a tag became a group [tag] after a restart. Would be helpful if that could be reflected after dragging.

8

The next release will fix this.

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