Can anyone explain this?
Before I can ask the question, I need to first provide a framework against which to compare the two results that I am seeing.
Background
I have a system that I use for bookkeeping that uses tags to categorize expenses that I feed into a number of home grown tools for report generation and tax preparation.
In this scenario, all my receipts are in a single group: “Ranch Receipts.” This is relevant for interpreting the info panels in the screenshots below.
A fully tagged receipt has 6 pairs of nested tags where each pair is of the form:
- parent:
tagType
- child:
tagType>tagValue
The child tag redundantly contains the name of the parent tag and a >
so that it can be interpreted as a hierarchical tag in the excellent Ammonite app that is a very useful tool to slice and dice your data based on tags and dates that I rely on for some steps in my processing.
The Problem
So with that framework, I scanned a receipt back in 2019 on my Mac and processed it in DEVONthink to add the 12 tags that you see in the first screenshot.
That is actually from my iPad Pro but it contains the same information on my Mac. All of this is as expected with 12 tags and the single “Ranch Receipts” location as expected. It is also the same on my iPhone.
The second screenshot is from my iPad mini and in this case the information is different even though the item was simply synced between the four devices.
In the second case the information pane only lists 10 of the 12 tags and represents the other two tags somehow via the two additional locations which are the tag groups with the same name as the missing tags in the tag list.
Clue
I stumbled upon this when trying to debug a shortcut where I am trying to add the 6 child tags tagType>tagValue
to a new item. I have recently learned that, through tag inheritance, this should automatically add the 6 parent tags if the child tag is already present in the parent tag group, as is the case here.
So, the expected result is that the new item will contain a total of 12 tags. However, that isn’t happening because, when I run the shortcut, some of the tags are created at the top level instead of within the parent tag, even though there is already a child tag with the same name in the parent group. In other words the tag inheritance seems to be failing and a new top level tag is being created.
This is what I see in the tag group in those cases:
tagType
tagType>tagValue
Instead of just
tagType
so now there are two tagType>tagValue
groups - a new one at the top level and the original one inside the tagType
group.
I think these issues are related because my shortcut development has been on the iPad mini (I’m traveling) and I think that my recent tag problems with the shortcuts have affected the earlier items from 2019, but only on my iPad mini.