I upgraded to DT4 and my smart rules are no longer working. I have tested all my on-demand rules and they all show up as greyed out in Tools → Apply Rules. Created a test rule to bounce the icon and ran it on all matching documents (PDF files in a group) and that is not firing either.
These rules were working fine in DT3.
A screenshot of a rule might facilitate to reproduce the issue. I see my smart rules working as they’re supposed to.
Are the targeted locations available, e.g., the databases the rules would act on?
They are. I am working on the documents and updating and have gone through verification and integrity checks. Please note the files are indexed (not in DBs).
A sample smart rule is:
Search in all Databases
All of the following are true: Kind is PDF/PS
Perform the action On Demand: Bounce Dock Item.
When I look at the smart rule, it shows that 1900 documents match the source condition (that the rule can apply to). I confirm that a test PDF file shows up in that list.
However, when I select that same PDF file and go to Tools → Apply Rules, every single rule shows up greyed out as none of them apply to the document.
I am not sure if Smart Rules are a Pro feature. I do have a Pro license and it shows in the about dialog. Maybe it’s not registering correctly.
Hold the Option key and choose Help > Report bug to start a support ticket.
Will do. Thanks
It was a license registration issue I think. I was seeing the premium feature stars on menu items too. I closed the software and restarted the computer and checked again and I no longer see the blue stars and the rules are working.
Thanks for your help, no bug needed but I guess a restart is required after the upgrade to get everything working properly. (I don’t ever shutdown DEVONthink as I refer to it multiple times during the day).
Thanks for the follow-up and I’m glad it’s working now.
I’m having the same issue. I’ve tested using Devonthink 4 on both an M1 MB Pro running MacOS 15.7 and an M4 Pro running MacOS 26.3. For a selected file, both “Apply Rules” and “Perform Rules” will be greyed out for some arbitrary amount of time. Eventually, some of the options are suddenly available under both menus. I’ve tried a million different combinations of operations on the docs in question to try to recreate this issue in some consistent manner. It truly seems that there is just some arbitrary amount of time that the document must be selected before any of the Apply Rules or Perform Rules options are available. The batch rules seem to be available from the start, oddly.
Most likely other triggered/scheduled smart rules are still executed and therefore these menu items are disabled.