How do you quickly find by date

DEVONthink Tips
1

What is the syntax for searching for a document created on a specific date in the normal search dialog (Cmnd - F) quickly?

Entering the obvious in the search bar “2013/10/12” doesn’t match on the date.

The DT manual has a section on “Date comparison operators” but these only seem to work on smart groups.

Alternatively going to the search window, clicking advanced search and then working through the dialog just takes in the region of 10 to 12 clicks before you even enter the date.

I have also tried shortcutting this through applescript but the scripting objects don’t have an operator to allow for date searching.

search v : Search records by string, label, state/flag, locking and/or age.
search [text] : The search string.
[age real] : Maximal age of records in seconds.
[comparison fuzzy/‌no case/‌no umlauts] : The comparison to use (default no case).
[in record] : The group to search in. Searches in current database if not specified.
[label integer] : Index of label (0-7) of records.
[locking boolean] : The locking of the records.
[state boolean] : The state/flag of the records.
[unread boolean] : The unread flag of the records.
[within all/‌comments/‌meta data/‌text contents/‌titles/‌URLs] : The attribute(s) to search within (default all).
→ list

Thanks,
Fredriko

2

The only other solution coming to my mind is to sort the search results by date. Depending on the number of results this might be faster. However, a future release will simplify this a lot (both the user interface and the search syntax).

3

If you have activated Spotlight indexing for your database(s), then use Spotlight’s features in Finder:

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“DEVON” is sufficient shorthand for finding .dtp2 documents (DEVONthink’s indices in the Spotlight cache). There is an enormous range of date predicate options in Spotlight.

4

Thanks korm (as usual !!).

I usually have spotlight turned off for my current databases which is why that didn’t occur to me.

Frederiko