Search for items not in a specific group

DEVONthink Tips
1

How can I search for items not in a specific group?

I have some items tagged with peter, but I have group peter as well. Now I want to find all items not in the group peter, but with the tag peter.

2

As far as I know this is not possible in a direct way.

You would either have to select all groups you want to search in but exclude group peter or temporarily exclude peter from search via the inspector.

As both ways are not very practical I’ve written scripts to temporarily exclude groups from search.

3

@pete31 is correct.
You can only exclude groups from searching. There is no option to exclude by location in searches, smart groups, etc.

4

Thanks for the responses @pete31 and @BLUEFROG.

I just tried it I excluded the group I do not want to find documents in from Search:

Screen Shot 2020-09-25 at 1.49.53 pm

However documents in that group (and the group itself) still show up when I search for the tag.

5

Update

When I have a general search term in the query it works. E.g.:

supercalifragilisticexpialidocious tags:peter

finds as expected only documents outside the excluded group peter with “supercalifragilisticexpialidocious” and the tag peter.

However when I serach just for the tag it doesn’t work for me. E.g. when searching

tags:peter

the excluded group and the documents in it tagged peter do appear in the search results.

Is this wrong or do I do something wrong?

In the case I want to solve I do not have a general search term.

6

Same here. Adding a wildcard * should do it.

1 Like
7

It’s a bug, the next maintenance release will fix this.

1 Like
8

Thanks for checking. And using * is a smart workaround! :smiley:

1 Like
9

Fair enough and good to know. Looking forward to the fix.