Parent tags and smart groups

DEVONthink
1

Hi,

I finally transitioned from DTPO 2 to DTP 3 yesterday. Glad to say it went a lot smoother than I feared – and the few oddities and problems that cropped up I was able to fix myself. Thank you so much to the whole team for all the terrific work you’ve put in!

One change from 2 to 3 is giving me a bit of a headache. I’ve simplified slightly, hopefully it’s clear what I mean:

I have a lot of articles and eBooks in my database. I want to be able to find these by their topics. So, in DTPO 2, I had a tag structure like this:

  • Reading Tags
    • Sociology
      • Organisational sociology
      • Bourdieu
    • Communication
    • Digitalisation
    • etc etc.

So, when I assign a tag, say “Communication”, both DTPO 2 and DTP 3 display the parent tag “Reading Tags” in the tag bar at the bottom.

What has changed is the way Smart Groups handle this. In DTPO 2, I was able to find untagged articles and books by creating a smart group with the criteria:

Kind is PDF
Tag is not “Reading tags”

DTPO then wouldn’t show any documents with the tag “Communication”.

This no longer works in DTP 3, which still displays documents with the tag “Communication”. I think this is as a result of the much-discussed tighter Finder integration – the smart group search only looks at the tags applied to the documents which are also visible in the Finder.

I believe this is intended behaviour, in which case my question is: How can I find my “untagged” PDFs and ePubs without having to change the several hundred documents I have tagged in the last few years?

Any advice is much appreciated. Thanks a lot!

3

Thanks for the kind words!

If you are looking for untagged PDFs, why not just use the Item is not Tagged criterion?

On the other hand, I am seeing a bug or unexpected behavior in more than one database, @cgrunenberg would have to assess.

test 02 in BDE is the child tag of Misc.

35%20AM
Screen Shot 2019-09-07 at 9.56.35 AM.png1254×536 201 KB

But a file clearly tagged Misc is reported.

46%20AM
Screen Shot 2019-09-07 at 9.56.46 AM.png1330×360 37.5 KB

4

Thanks for your reply! I considered this, but many of the articles are not actually untagged – they may for example have tags like “Seminar 01”, “Seminar 02” etc, which I use to order readings in the context of a specific seminar. What I meant to ask was: How do I find the articles without any child tags of the “reading tags” parent tag?

As for your report, you are indeed correct and I didn’t properly test before opening the topic. It also does not seem to matter whether the file is stored in the database or has been indexed (and the tags written to it for Finder to see).

As this does seem to be an issue involving Development, I’ll wait for further information.

5

You’re welcome :slight_smile:

6

A copy of the database or a small example database would be great, thanks. Because as usual a simple test was successful :slight_smile:

7

In case @BLUEFROG hasn’t provided this yet via some internal communication channel, I’ve just put together a quick database that shows the behaviour in my setup. Demo 2019-09-10.dtBase2.zip (11.4 KB)

8

Thanks for the database, really appreciated. The next release will fix this.

1 Like
9

And thanks to you for the terrific support!

1 Like