How drag and move handle replicants

Dear DTPO members

(1) I have files (resides in DTPO) with several replicants in different groups. If I create a smart group filtered by tags and drag all the files within the smart group to a group (existing or newly created). Will all replicants of these files remain in the same place or they will all moved? Should I use right-click “Replicate to” (or copy and paste) instead of drag and move if I want to keep those replicants in the original place? Basically I want to re-file my files in its main group to sub-group, but those files already have replicants in other groups.

(2) I found that if I search for file/s with replicants in the main window’s search box, only one instance of the file will be displayed (which is normal/expected). However, which group is determined as the primary group that the file/s belong to?

Thank you in advance

If you drag the documents out of the smart group;

a) with no modifer keys down, the documents will be moved and all replicants will be gone.

b) with the command key down, the documents will be duplicated and the original documents and replicants will be unchanged.

c) with the command-option keys down, the the documents will be replicated and the original documents and replicants will be unchanged.

Option c would appear to be what you are looking for, but you should test with sample data to confirm before using this on a large set of documents. You would still need to deal with the fact that the replicants would still be in the ‘main group’

The ‘source’ replicant is determined by the order that the documents/replicants were created. If I create a document in GroupA, then replicate it to GroupB and then again to GroupC, the location of the replicant in the search window will be GroupA. If I delete the replicant (original source document) in GroupA, then the loction of the replicant in the search window is GroupB.

Having explained this, I will say that this info has some utility if the documents are indexed in the database, but if the documents are contained in the database I cannot imagine when it would matter.

1 Like

Dear Grey

Thanks you for your detailed explanation on using different modifying keys. It is very helpful for me to distinguish which action I really need in classifying my files!

Re the reason for asking the order of search results for files with replicants: All of my reference papers are automatically imported from a specific external folder to a designated group - like an inbox with a specific purpose. I don’t use indexed folder because I have encountered some tag-sync issues between DTPO and High Sierra when there are frequent changes in tag name and location within DTPO. I want to check whether I have accidentally “moved” the files from the initial pool of all my papers (the designated group in DTPO) or I have correctly “replicated” those files in different sub-groups without needing to go into the “get info” window of each file and check the “instances” field.

I just found out that there is an easier way to do it: by disable the option “Exclude groups from tagging” . I can see from the “tags” field within the “get info” regarding which group have my file been assigned to. The easiest way is supposed to enable “Show Tags” from menu: then I can just see which groups (shown as grey-colour tag) the file is assigned directly from the tag-bar. However, I always have more than one row of tags for each file (I use tags to assign key words to each file), not all group-as-tag can be displayed.

Is there anyway to re-order the tags by kind for all/selected set of files ? ie group-as-tag followed by normal tags?

Thank you in advance
George

Thank you very much!
George

DEVONthink has a Navigation Bar that appears right under the Tool Bar that will display the path to the source location of the document. Even if you have a replicant selected in a different group, the path in the Navigation Bar will point back to the source.

Not that I am aware of, although you could go to the Tags view and sort by location. At a minimum that would group all the Blue tags together in the list. I expect that’s not what you are wanting, but it may have some utility.

Dear Grey

Thanks for all the tips that I have overlooked even after two years of daily usage of DTPO!
Re the sorting of tags, I have done some research on internet and found that tag in MacOS is simply not designed to be sortable and the natural sort order is by the time of entry unless being re-ordered by users. So I guess you are right that we can’t expect tag can be sorted in DTPO as they are using the same properties of files. I guess that the only way is to hope that some sort of customisable meta data fields will be added in the future updates of already very flexible/powerful DTPO.

Best regards
George

Dear Grey

You are a genius. You suggested that I use tag view and ordered by location. This suggestion inspires me to have a quick and dirty solution:

Since tags in tag bar (view->show tags) are displayed in the reversed order of time of entry (the last added tag of a file is displayed first). All I have to do is to add some special character (such as * or #) as the first character of the groups’ names that I want to focus on. All groups with these newly added special characters will be shown at the very beginning of the tag bar ! The best thing is once I’m done with one set of focused groups, all I have to do is to remove the characters. I can now manipulate the displaying sequence of the group-as-tags in whatever order I need and I can change that order simply by deleting/adding one special character to the groups!

Many thanks
George