Tags on Groups

DEVONthink Tips
1

Sorry if this is covered elsewhere. I did a search, but didn’t find anything relevant. I would appreciate links to posts already covering this if they exist.

I just set up a new group and assigned a tag to it in Info panel. Now new entries automatically get the tag of the group. So far so good. The problem arises if I drag an entry out of the group and into a new one. The automatically added tag disappears.

I’m currently taking notes for a new software package, so initially I’d like to dump all my info into one group and have them all tagged with the name of the software. Eventually, some of the notes would get sorted out into more appropriate groups. I’d like them all to have the software’s tag so that I can easily find them even if they are not in a the master group.

I realize that I can select all the entries in the group and add a tag fairly easily, but I’m trying to avoid as much manual work as possible so I don’t accidentally make a mistake.

Before I applied the tag to the group, I had a number of entires that I had tagged by hand. After applying the tag to the group, dragging those entries to another group kept their tag information.

I’m not sure if what I’m seeing is intended behavior, a bug, or just a flaw in my thought process.

Apologies in advance if this has been confusing: I’m battling a cold that has reduced my mental capacity to mush.

Thanks,
Dave

2

I hope you feel better, soon.

What you’re seeing is the consequence of tag inheritance. The image shows what happens in the case you described:

the tag borg is assigned to Group 1 and therefore Group 1 is replicated to that tag. Any child of Group 1 inherits all of Group 1’s tags – in this case, borg. If Group 1 has child groups (i.e., Group 2) they and their children also inherit Group 1’s tags – borg again. When you drag a document out of one of these groups they are no longer inheritors of its tag hierarchy, and the tag “disappears”.

The solution here is to not assign critical tags to groups, but assign critical tags directly to documents so that no matter where the document is moved it retains that tag.

A tip: if you have a few tags that you want to assign frequently to documents, make that tag a Favorite – control-click the tag inside the database’s Tags group and choose Add to Favorites. The tag will show in the sidebar’s “Favorites” (with the wrong icon, but ignore that). Select document(s) and drag to the tag in the sidebar. Voilà - that tag is assigned to the document(s).