'any:' Search. Works with 'Tags', Not 'Notebooks'!

[RavBoy 188]

I'm trying to create a shortcut, of a saved-search, that when triggered will return/find all the notes contained within two different notebooks.

I tried:

(SEARCH 1 TEST)    any:  notebook:"1st-notebook" notebook:"2nd-notebook"   

This returned zero results.  So I added a Tag, the same Tag, to all notes in '1st-notebook' tagged 'red', and a different Tag, 'black', to all the notes in '2nd-notebook'.  

(SEARCH 2 TEST)   any:  tag:black tag:red  

This saved search was successful and returned search results that were tagged either/or, 'red' or 'black', rather than finding notes with both 'red' and 'black' Tags.  

Does any one know why my (Search 1 Test) focused on 'notebook:' fails to work?

[DTLow 5,721]

3 minutes ago, RavBoy said:

Does any one know why my (Search 1 Test) focused on 'notebook:' fails to work?

Search grammar is documented here http://dev.evernote.com/doc/articles/search_grammar.php

Notebooks are special; only a single notebook can be specified, :any not allowed

[RavBoy 188]

Just read through that linked article, thanks.  Yeah this definitely can't be done. From the article, the closest to an answer I could find was:

"notebook:[nb name] - will match notes in a notebook with the provided name. Name matching is case-insensitive. Since notebooks have exclusive relationships with notes, at most one notebook can be provided for the search. If no notebook is given, the search will go over all of the user's active notes. The notebook is not included in the "union" created by the "any:" operator."

[jefito 5,587]

It's not documented in the search grammar page, but in the Windows client, you can use a search like stack:MyStack to  filter on a particular stack, i.e., multiple notebooks.But any: only works with tags, as documented.

[RavBoy 188]

30 minutes ago, jefito said:

you can use a search like stack:MyStack to  filter on a particular stack, i.e., multiple notebooks.

In my scenario, the 2 Notebooks are within 2 different Stacks.  I tried the 'stack:' search just in case, but as you said it only filters on 'a' particular Stack, meaning it didn't work to return notes from multiple notebooks (that are in 2 diff stacks) cheers anyway

[gazumped 10,417]

I got around this by select all in each notebook and tagging the notes with the notebook name.  Then 'any:' works with one or more tags.  Probably not the best way to do this,  but it was quick and it worked...

[jefito 5,587]

7 hours ago, RavBoy said:

In my scenario, the 2 Notebooks are within 2 different Stacks.  I tried the 'stack:' search just in case, but as you said it only filters on 'a' particular Stack, meaning it didn't work to return notes from multiple notebooks (that are in 2 diff stacks) cheers anyway

Stack terms operate like notebook terms: no more than one per search (and you can't have a stack term and a notebook term in the same search). All I was really doing was pointing up the fact that on at least one Evernote platform, you can filter by more than one notebook at a time.  and that that's not documented in the Evernote docs. It's not generally usable for arbitrary filtering, though I find it convenient  to deal with notebooks shared between my home and work accounts (though not using a "stack:" term, just clicking on the stack of interest in the left panel)