Smart rules can be used to automatically tag records depending on their content. However, that approach requires one smart rule per tag. A more flexible and less smart rule intensive approach is to use a script like the following (JavaScript!)
/* Define a mapping between tags and search terms
The first entry must be a string, i.e. the tag,
the second one (search term) can be a string or a regular expression
If the plain text of a DT record matches the search term
either as a regular expression or as a string, the corresponding tag is added to the record
*/
const tagToSearchTerm = {
/* Set tag "Insurance" if "Allianz" is found in the text */
"Insurance": "Allianz",
/* Set Tag "Phone" if "Telekom", "Telecom", "AT&T" or "Bell" is found in the text */
"Phone": /Tele[kc]om|AT&T|Bell/,
/* Set tag "Bank" if "Deutsche Bank", "UBS" or "ING" is found in the text */
"Bank": /Deutsche\s+Bank|UBS|ING/i,
};
(() => { /* SMART RULE USAGE: replace with 'function performsmartrule(records) */
const app = Application("DEVONthink 3")
const records = app.selectedRecords(); /* SMART RULE USAGE: remove this line */
/* Loop over all selected records. */
records.forEach(r => {
/* get the records plainText */
const txt = r.plainText();
/* Ignore records without a plainText */
if (!txt || txt.length === 0) return;
const newTags = [];
/* Loop over all elements of tagToSearchTerm */
for (const [t, search] of Object.entries(tagToSearchTerm)) {
/* Check if the search term matches the current record's plainText. Depending
on the type of search term (RE or String), 'match' or 'indexOf' is used */
const match = search instanceof RegExp ? txt.match(search) : txt.indexOf(search) > -1;
/* If the search term matches, add the tag to the list of new tags */
if (match) {
newTags.push(t);
}
}
// newTags contains tags for all search terms found in the current record
// add them to the current record's tags
r.tags = [...r.tags(), ...newTags];
})
})() /* SMART RULE USAGE: remove this line */
It relies on a mapping between tags and search terms (defined at the top of the script). The search term can be a simple string or a regular expression. If it’s found in a record, the corresponding tag is added to this record.
Note 1: This is but a simple example. Ideally, it would be possible to define several tags for each search term. For this, a more complicated mapping would be required.
Note 2: As it stands, the script works on the currently selected records. To make it usable in a smart rule, one has to
- replace the line
(() => {at the beginning of the script with
function performsmartrule(records) - remove the line
const records = app.selectedRecords(); - remove the line
})()at the end of the script
