Wildcard search causing DT to crash

DEVONthink Tips
1

I am running DEVONthink PE 1.9a. The program hangs during certain searches. I’ve been able to reproduce the problem as follows:

  • In the browser window, the Find criteria is set to: All/All Words/No Case/Database.
  • Nothing is selected on the left pane.
  • I start typing the following characters in the Find box: *co
  • The spinning beach ball starts and does not go away unless I force quit DT.

It looks like the wildcard “*” is causing the hang, although not in every scenario.

Same freezing occurs if I open up the Search tool and using the same search criteria as above, starting with the “*” wildcard.

Typing “*co” or “*po” (without the quotes) and clicking on the search button will cause DT to crash.

I have applied all of the Tools utilities: Verify & Repair, Backup & Optimize, Restore Backup, Rebuild Database. But the problem persists. I also tried using DT on another Mac with a different database, but the same crash occurs.

Does anyone else notice this?

2

If you wait long enough during certain freezes DT eventually returns control to you. A personal example from the last couple days are some unusually long delays when clicking the Classify button before the drawer opens; it’s not consistently repeatable. And awhile back in some earlier alpha versions of DT Pro I’d experience freezes that could last over 20 minutes; that’s an extreme case.

Just mentioning that in case you have patience to try waiting longer instead of using Force Quit “too soon”. Still, unusually long hangs certainly seem like the symptom of some problem, even if they’re temporary.

3

It’s actually a bug of Cocoa’s wildcard matching which sometimes runs endlessly. And that’s the main reason why XML plugins of DA 1.5 will only support simplified wildcards for example. And as DT 2.0 will support the operators of DA, this will bypass the problem.

4

Good info, thanks!