Use Case
- I would like to add descriptions to my smart rules and smart groups.
- I would like to search for specific smart rules and smart groups in the side panel
Why I’m requesting this
I have many smart groups and rules, organized into folders, most with meaningful names.
One of my rules checks for missing tags in my business documents database. Since I don’t always remember to tag my contract groups, this rule helps catch the oversight. However, when it fails, I have to scroll through my list of smart rules to find the specific one and identify which group is causing the failure.
What I’d like instead: the ability to enter a keyword (matching the name and/or description) and get a filtered list of matching rules/groups.
I’m open to alternative solutions—I understand I could use AppleScript for this specific case. But beyond this particular example, I often find myself scrolling up and down just to locate a specific rule.
How do your smart rules’ actions and conditions look like? Just wondering whether many of them could be easily merged into one (e.g. compress, apply ocr, maybe the tagging).
1 Like
I initially tried combining multiple scripts into a single smart rule, but found it tedious to debug. I also use separate AppleScripts for each use case to make troubleshooting and development easier.
Mindset: Be focused and try to make the logic of the rules easy/easier to understand. Besides that: I organized my rules into a workflow with separated clearly isolated steps.
Prepare documents
Detect document types
Examples for scripted smart rules
It looks like overengineering to me. Like checking for a tag and checking for the word count to decide if you need to OCR a PDF or to check the content of a document without a text layer.
And performing smart rules every minute? That’s overkill.
I do like your idea of the smart rule hierarchy to control the order they are executed.
I don’t see how the hierarchy controls the order of execution. If I wanted to run the smart rules in a particular sequence I’d use the execute smart rule command.
This might also alleviate the need for tags to indicate the current state of a document.
