Smart Rules: Search In with option to exclude sub-groups?

Hello!

I have set up a group for research material for a monthly magazine I work for. And I have got another group where for many years I have been pushing into all the old material I can’t use any more for future issues of that magazine. Simply put, an archive.

DevonTHINK 3 now does heavily facilitate my laziness which results in me wanting to have a Smart Rule that tidies up the magazine group all by itself. If the added date of an item in “Magazine” is six weeks or more ago the rule should move the item to “Old Stuff”.

The problem: The “Old Stuff” group is nested in the “Magazine” group. When I set up a Smart Rule to search in “Magazine” the item indicator of the Smart Rule does not only show the 10 items in “Magazine” (of which five should be moved) but 579, which is the total number of items in “Magazine” and its sub-group “Old Stuff”.

For testing purposes I applied this rule to one item that already was in the “Old Stuff” folder and nothing happened, at least visibly. So far that’s good, no duplicate was created. But I wonder what will happen when this rule will continually work in the background and with hundreds of files.

One solution would have been an “item is not in [folder]” condition but there is no such condition in Smart Rules.

I know that items can be excluded from searches in the Info pane and maybe that would apply to Smart Rules too. But I don’t want to exclude the “Old Stuff” group in general from every search. Just from this one Smart Rule.

So my questions are: Am I overlooking something here? And if not, would it be possible to add an “exclude sub-groups” option for Search In?

The simplest thing here would be to move the Old Stuff group out of the Magazine group. It would be easily targeted by a smart rule and remain searchable.

Yes of course it would. But since it’s not just any Old Stuff but Magazine’s Old Stuff a nested archive folder is the proper place for that.

So maybe you might consider adding an exclude sub-groups option. Some day well after the official release of v3 of this very fine app of course.

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