Question about Stacks

[FAO 0]

When I create a stack and move Notebooks into the stack, the stack will display all the notes from the notebooks. Is it supposed to do that? It is very confusing.

 

[gazumped 11,667]

Hi.  Just like All Notes displays all notes from all notebooks,  a Stack view shows all the notes from all the notebooks within it.  Choose a notebook to limit the view further,  or add a search term.

[PinkElephant 8,117]

You always see above the notes list the current selection applied, be it all notes, a stack or a single notebook.

More refined lists can be build using the filter tool. Now the confusing detail: Filters can be added on the AllNotes level, or on the notebook level. They can’t be added at the stack level.

The reason behind this is that the „stack“ does not really „exist“ - a stack comes into life when it is defined in the metadata of a notebook. It is not an independent part of the EN database. Thus it is not available in the filters tool.

You can create a search using the advanced search syntax, define what you want to see and save it to have this special view available when you need it. But this takes your question probably a bit too far.

[Mike P 2,643]

7 hours ago, PinkElephant said:

You can create a search using the advanced search syntax, define what you want to see and save it to have this special view available when you need it. But this takes your question probably a bit too far.

The other advantage is that if you use 

stack:"stack name"

to access the list of all notes in the stack, rather than simply clicking on a stack, the filter menu is available. 

[eric99 980]

1 hour ago, Mike P said:

The other advantage is that if you use 

stack:"stack name"

to access the list of all notes in the stack, rather than simply clicking on a stack, the filter menu is available. 

If this works, then filtering should be possible by just selecting the stack as well

[Mike P 2,643]

6 minutes ago, eric99 said:

If this works, then filtering should be possible by just selecting the stack as well

I agree. I have no idea why EN have chosen not to include the filter menu in the stack view. Either it is an oversight or there is some "logical" reason that we are not party to.

[eric99 980]

30 minutes ago, Mike P said:

I agree. I have no idea why EN have chosen not to include the filter menu in the stack view. Either it is an oversight or there is some "logical" reason that we are not party to.

It would be a real improvement if stack selection would behave like the notebook selection: you could set your default search context for multiple notebooks at once (= separate workspaces)

[PinkElephant 8,117]

Personally I think it is a technical issue: A note is an entity in EN, and a notebook is an entity.

A stack AFAIK is only a field in the notebooks metadata. So there is in the database a table you can read to filter for notebooks. But there is no table of the stacks - you read the notebook metadata to get the stacks extracted. And this is relatively inefficient, which maybe forbids to use the stacks as a filter.

Just my 5cts …

[eric99 980]

46 minutes ago, PinkElephant said:

Personally I think it is a technical issue: A note is an entity in EN, and a notebook is an entity.

A stack AFAIK is only a field in the notebooks metadata. So there is in the database a table you can read to filter for notebooks. But there is no table of the stacks - you read the notebook metadata to get the stacks extracted. And this is relatively inefficient, which maybe forbids to use the stacks as a filter.

Just my 5cts …

But why then does stack:"stack name"  work in the search filter? I think they just overlooked it.

[PinkElephant 8,117]

Just my thinking, not knowledge: Because it is a search, and I think people use searches much less than they set filters. 

I think it has simply to do with server load - reading an index for a filter is way more efficient than to read through the notebook metadata to build an intermediate table, then used to create the search results.

The index is usually kept up to date permanently, and must only be read. A search table must be rebuild every time. But for efficiency you can’t have everything indexed - why it was probably decided to leave the stack out of indexing.

But this is my Pidgin knowledge about databases - so take it with a grain of doubt.

[Shawn.H 10]

Stacks was much more supported in the legacy versions.

I miss easily being able to search a stack. Yes I know the command  ...

stack:"stack name"

It works well on desktop.  Much more effort on the mobile side of things to get the same result.

[agsteele 2,950]

I haven't played with this so very much but would a Saved Search be a useful mechanism? I have a successful search inside a stack saved in my shortcuts.

[PinkElephant 8,117]

I am not sure what this is all about.

The search syntax phrase 

Search_String Stack:mystack 

works on mobile (tried on iOS) as it works on desktop. That stacks are only a weak organizational tool is true for both as well.