Sorter and searching for groups

DEVONthink
1

My understanding is the the Sorter is used to quickly locate Groups within DT3 to drag-and-drop files. That is also how I’m using it. What I don’t understand is how the Group names are matched.

In my use I typically know at least some of the group’s name. Say I have a group called TestGroup. I can remember that group has test in its name followed by a g for group. In the Sorter I type testg and find the group quickly.

image
image900×232 29.6 KB

So far so good. If on the other hand I also have a group called aTestGroup and follow the same procedure as above I get nothing. It’s only when - with great effort - I remember it starts with atest that I get the group I’m looking for.
image

As a user I would very much prefer to recall parts of the group name without it depending on the location of the part within the name.

If I use the DT3 search fields typically I would type in something along the lines of ~test and get the desired list of groups (+ any files in this case that match the search term).

2

The search prefers word boundaries to avoid too many results, therefore the first character should be the prefix of a word. But it’s not a simple “contains” search, e.g. tg would also match TestGroup.

3

Thanks for the answer. Some follow-up suggestions:

  • provide a “contains” option so that I can be 100% sure I’ve located all possible groups
  • document the search functionality for the Sorter. Unless I’m mistaken things such as word boundaries (I assume space and/or capital letters) are not documented and would impact how I as a user name my groups
  • add the transition from numbers to letters as a word boundary. I tend to use add the year of the project to my project name e.g. 2019Project1 and 2019Project2 etc…If I now search for Project1 (and I can’t remember the year) it does not show up.

In that case it would be useful to know how the boundaries are determined as these impact

1 Like