"Sticky" menubar searches and duplicated results

DEVONthink Tips
1

I’d be interested to know if anyone else has experienced these quirks.

  1. I appreciate DT’s recent ability to start searching as soon as some text is entered into the menubar search field … but I really don’t appreciate the inability to finish entering the word (or words) as DT grinds to a halt while it searches. It makes the application feel like walking through treacle.

There are plenty of other applications which perform instant menubar searches and still allow you to complete the menubar search entry. Mail for one. Hog Bay NoteBook 2.x for another (I’m not including 3.x here as it has in many ways taken a backward step) … and others that I’ve used.

So Christian, can you do anything to eliminate this unwelcome "stickiness".

  1. Frequently when I perform a search (from the menubar or from Search…) it will indicate that it has found the same document two or three times, when in fact there is in fact only one copy of that document in the database. This must be a bug that’s easy to eliminate … but am I the only one who has experienced this odd behaviour?
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  1. The next release will both increase the performance and use a background thread to search and therefore this shouldn’t happen anymore. In the meantime, don’t use the “Phrase” or “Wildcards” option - they are of course quite slow.

  2. Never received any similar report - is there definitely only one copy of the document inside the database and is the document not duplicated?

3

Several releases ago (1.6.x?) I had a problem with “orphaned content”, i.e. searches locating content without any associated item.  I ended up exporting everything while running that version on Jaguar, then imported to a newer version of DT when I upgraded to Panther.  Haven’t noticed any database- or search-related troubles since.

4

I’m glad this problem will be resolved. Thanks! I tend not to use the "Phrase" or "Wildcard" options for the very reasons you give.

This problem occurs all the time, when there is definitely no duplicate of the document in the database, partly because the path is now on display for each item (thanks for that, very useful), and also because just to be sure I have several times tried to "reveal" each separate instance … all revealed the same doc. I did actually prepare a screendump for you to see the result, but couldn’t figure out how to incorporate it into one of these threads, so I will email it to you.

5

Thanks for the screenshots. This looks actually like a bug although I’ve never seen anything similar before and never received a similar bug report too.

Could you upload your stuffed or zipped DEVONthink database folder to <ftp://ftp.devon-technologies.com/incoming>? That would be really helpful. Thank you!

6

The file is 264 MB, and 105.6 MB zipped. Do you still want me to send it?

7

Hopefully this won’t be necessary as I have an idea what might be going on and will check this first. The bug seems to be related to the following conditions:

  1. Usage of "Any Words" option
  2. Entering multiple words
  3. There are documents in the database containing all entered words

If that’s really the problem, then I wonder why nobody has noticed this before :wink: