I am trying DT demo for the first time,
I want to know if excluding the whole group from search is possible.
I have a lot of folders from my older projects and I don’t really need them. So, if I search something - through search or smart list - I don’t want them to bug me in the results. But I want to keep them there “just in case”. I don’t want to change them, either.
However, if I set “Exclude on search” in info panel on the group, it looks like it doesn’t recursively excludes files inside. The same with locking in for writing.
How do I recursively lock or exclude for search a large group, if not through Info panel?
If you are trying the Pro (Office) version you could easily do this with our Automator actions. But I just checked and saw that the current “Set Record Attributes” action doesn’t support all Exlude from options yet. It will in the next release.
Of course you can also use AppleScript but this may be more complicated.
Is there any Automator action that’s the inverse of “Set Record Attributes” or some other method of getting “Get Record Attributes”-like results with Automator?
If possible, I’d like to use Automator to search for and list documents/groups with attributes settings that can’t be easily located some other way, e.g. those with certain “Exclude from …” settings enabled.
As I’ve mentioned before, not being able to search for docs/groups with certain attributes can be like trying to find needles in haystacks.
You could use a brute-force approach by using “Filter Records” but it’s not very efficient and like “Set Attributes” doesn’t support all these exclusion options (yet).
Using “Filter Records” returns the expected results, though I’m still not sure what to do with them. For testing purposes opening a TextEdit window containing the file pathnames is okay. What’s really slow and memory-intensive is the “Get Selected Records” action running before it. Maybe there’s a more optimal way to get input for “Filter Records”? Currently it would be barely tolerable running this infrequently with at most a couple hundred records selected. I’d like to be able to increase that number and have it still remain tolerable (with memory usage being more of a concern than speed).
But all this would all be unnecessary to me if/when Smart Group criteria supports it. Matching for records containing aliases and scripts is already helpful.