Ideas on how to make the following smart group?

Hi-

Can anyone suggest a way to do this:
Here’s the scenario: I have notes about a particular issue spread among a whole lot of different folders. I want to create a smartgroup to collect all these notes (files, folders) in one group. So basically, I want to have a smartgroup that collects files/subgroups from other folders. Sounds easy right. However, “folder” is not an option on the smartgroup search menu.

Any suggestions?

thanks!!

Create a tag and apply it to those items. A tag can be applied to a group. to multiple selected documents or to an individual document, so tags can come in handy when it would be tricky to devise a search query and filters in a smart group.

Now, in the Tags view, click on that tag and you will see your content properly collected.

And if that might be useful, you can use that tag as a criterion in a smart group.

HI Bill,

Thanks for the suggestion. The only problem with that is that, per another thread in the dt forum, you cannot do smartfolder searches using Tags. Apparently it’s a bug they will address in the next iteration. Any other ideas without using tags?

As I recall, a single Tag criterion in a smart group worked in public beta 8. It certainly does in the upcoming next release, which I’m using now.

But as I noted, the tag approach lets you associate items using your own judgement, and in some cases that can be a lot easier than trying to pull together items that would require a complex query and filters. You can, for example, use a tag for a collection of items sorted and selected for a date range, such as ‘third quarter 2009’ — something that’s not yet possible with the smart group editor. Then you can use that tag in a smart group along with other criteria to ‘slice and dice’ items in the third quarter of 2009. With a little cogitation, tags can be used in cases where multiple predicates in the smart group editor would fail.

Overall, I’m not a fan of tagging — I generally don’t think the time and effort to tag many items is worth it. But tags do provide a new tool in DEVONthink (and DEVONnote) that allow one to pull off new kinds of tricks. I like that.

Probably any attribute not used in your database could be used, e.g. if there are no indexed files/folders, you could simply use “Instance is not indexed”. Another possibility is “Label is not ”.

Thank you for the replies. In the short term, I may wait for the final version of 2.0, and go the Tags method. Feb 24th…

Looking forward to it.