I have been tidying up a number of old databases, and adding filing dates to the items names via batch process in some instances, and via smart rule in other instances.
For reasons of caution and not wanting to change the inbound date element of item names for some files this has been , to date, been piecemeal across databases.
To check progress and once satisfied with the files selected then change the date / name structure I have created the attached smart group to identify items without dates.
I would expect these items to NOT be displayed.
These results occur across all databases, even after the smart rule / batch process has been run again.
Any thoughts please?
I think that the “contains (not)” condition does not work with character ranges. If I use the “matches” condition (ie the first one in the list), I can positively select records with date. Unfortunately, there is no “does not match” condition.
If that is true (@BLUEFROG?), you could use a smart group that selects the records having a date (ie name:[0-9][0-9][0-9]-[0-9][0-9]-[0-9][0-9]etc.) and tags them with something like “thisrecordnamedoesindeedcontainadate”. Then, in a smartgroup, you could select all records not having this tag.
There might be a less convoluted way, of course.
Thanks for your thoughts.
Interestingly , if I change the item names so that two of them no longer have a date in front, and I change the smart group into a smart rule, the smart rule displays the same list of 3 items, when I run it it adds the date to the two items without a date, as expected, but continues to show three items.
It is as if the rules work in the background, but the display of items does not account for the character range rule…..maybe 
I will try your suggestion as a work around. Ta
