Maximal Number of Values in a Single-line Text Custom Metadata

I am planned to use a single-line text custom metadata as essentially a main label for document in order to take advantage of autocomplete. Essentially I would start with a scanned document, keep the title unchanged (as the scan date and time have been very useful to me), and then start typing the title I am going to assign to assure similar documents don’t end up with different names eg. “T-Mobile” vs “TMobile”.

As the list grows bigger will I reach a limit? Will it start bogging down when attempting an autocomplete? Also is there any way to batch enter the list as I already have this from another program and is there a way to get a new item entered directly from the inspector rather than having to go to preference? From my experimentation and reading I think the answer to the last two question is no.

Which list actually? The one defined by you in Preferences > Data or the just the recently used values? The recently used list is limited to 50 values currently.

The list defined in Preferences >Data.

This list is unlimited. How many values do you want to add?

The current list is over 2,000 however many are essentially duplicates: “company x”, “company x statements”, etc. as the original program I was using did not have great options for subcategories. So the question is will the autocorrect slow down with increasing number of values?

  • And you’re planning on pruning this list to remove redundancies, correct?
    • If so, how many would be in the final list?
  • And where is this list found?

Absolutely going to “prune” but not clear yet how large the list will actually be. Expect to be 1,000 plus. They are coming from a migration of Mariner’s Paperless. I exported the database portion to excel and then came up with a list of uniques from the “Title” field–essentially the names of all scanned documents stored there.

Sheesh! :flushed:
Is this for a business?

Here is a simple test with 1000 single-line items as zeropadded numbers.
While not 100% scientific, there is no delay in autocompletion.

max single line items test.tsv.zip (2.3 KB)

No. it is for personal use.

Thanks for the estimate. I’ll let you know if my experience runs into problems with performance.

I guess take it as a complement that people are finding ways to use DEVONthink beyond where you thought they would.

We’d appreciate the feedback :slight_smile: