The downside of nested tags in conducting searches in win desktop

[idoc 413]

If I'm looking for the search term "flubby" but I only want to find it in notes with tag "NY8-2024" then it seems as if I have two choices:

-Enter "flubby" in the search box and it finds 3 notes.  At this point I can go to the filter icon and select the tag "NY8-2024" and it drills down to the 2 notes that I'm looking for.

-Or,  enter  "flubby NY8-2024"  in the search bar.

If I select the filter icon and enter the tag (NY8-2024) and then enter "flubby" in the search bar, it gives me 17 notes with the tag NY8-2024 .  I then have to re-enter the search term "flubby" to get the two notes that I want. In other words, I can't enter the tag and then drill down to a specific search term in that order.  

Also, it turns out that my tag "NY8-2024" is nested under the tag "NY" which has 30 subtags.  However, if I can't remember exactly which tag I want I can't do the search directly from the search bar using tag:NY unless I append "*" to the tag eg:  flubby tag:NY*.  

If I want to find the term "flubby" but I don't care about the NY one ie: I'm looking for a flubby that is somewhere in the tag "WorkFolder"; then I will be unable to find it unless I know the exact subtag of WorkFolder where it is .  In this instance, there is no way I can drill down to it.  Putting "WorkFolder" in the search bar or the filter icon is useless.  The only solution here is to search for "flubby" and then manually sift through all the notes or use the search bar to search for flubby but exclude all of the ones with NY tags (-tag:NY*)

Am I understanding these limitations correctly?  It seems that for people with lots of nested tags there are some serious limitations in searching.  

[PinkElephant 8,819]

Tag:NY8-2024 flubby

or

flubby Tag:NY8-2024

[Mike P 2,980]

12 hours ago, idoc said:

If I select the filter icon and enter the tag (NY8-2024) and then enter "flubby" in the search bar, it gives me 17 notes with the tag NY8-2024 .  I then have to re-enter the search term "flubby" to get the two notes that I want. In other words, I can't enter the tag and then drill down to a specific search term in that order.

There are long standing issues with "filter then search". It's actually improved a bit recently. For search to take any notice of the tag filter you have already added it needs to appear underneath the search bar like this

If it doesn't appear you can collapse and expand the sidebar (F10 twice on Windows).

Even with the tag in place it will often ignore the first time you search, sometimes deleting the search term othertimes leaving it there but ignoring it. To illustrate this

Initial filter using the tag  $nextRead

 

Add the search term data and press enter. It looks like it has worked, except that the number of notes found is still the same

Go back into the search field and press enter again Finally we have the correct results

 

13 hours ago, idoc said:

However, if I can't remember exactly which tag I want I can't do the search directly from the search bar using tag:NY unless I append "*" to the tag eg:  flubby tag:NY*. 

Tag search from the main search bar is pretty useless, although it is better if you have already done some searching/filtering - you might get 6 tags listed. I normally use either the main pop out tag list or the filter.

13 hours ago, idoc said:

If I want to find the term "flubby" but I don't care about the NY one ie: I'm looking for a flubby that is somewhere in the tag "WorkFolder"; then I will be unable to find it unless I know the exact subtag of WorkFolder where it is .

If you want to find notes that are tagged with one of more sub-tags within a main tag you select the main tag and use the drop down arrow from the blue tag lozenge. You can then choose to  "include sub-tags".

Despite all the issues with search and filtering, which don't seem to be a priority for the EN team, the advanced search syntax has continued to work perfectly. I therefore have AutoHotKey scripts that will take a tag from the sidebar, the main tag window or the tag area at the bottom of the note, convert it into tag:tag_name format and add it to the search. Just my way of trying to get EN to work as I want it to.

 

 

[Mike P 2,980]

41 minutes ago, Mike P said:

Just my way of trying to get EN to work as I want it to.

Just thought I would list why my system works for me:

• Can use the tags where I normally find them (mainly the sidebar or at the bottom of a note)
• Can reliably search for tags in the main tag window if I don't remember the exact name
• Can access the tag:tag_name text with no extra typing
• Can make it a new search or add to an existing search - it's not fussy - it just adds the search term to whatever is in the search bar already.
• Can easily edit the search string using Boolean search terms (thankyou BS for making that available to all users) to get exactly what I want:

tag:a AND (tag:b OR tag:c)

• Can mix and match text and tags in whatever order I like

Obviously if your search is only for one tag the existing EN functionaility works well. But if you want to add further tags or text the system is prone to failure or just slow. e.g. why does the pop-up from the tags at the bottom of a note not have the option to add the tag to the filter/search - there is only the ability to create a new filter.

[idoc 413]

10 hours ago, Mike P said:

There are long standing issues with "filter then search". It's actually improved a bit recently. For search to take any notice of the tag filter you have already added it needs to appear underneath the search bar like this

If it doesn't appear you can collapse and expand the sidebar (F10 twice on Windows).

Even with the tag in place it will often ignore the first time you search, sometimes deleting the search term othertimes leaving it there but ignoring it. To illustrate this

Initial filter using the tag  $nextRead

 

Add the search term data and press enter. It looks like it has worked, except that the number of notes found is still the same

Go back into the search field and press enter again Finally we have the correct results

 

Tag search from the main search bar is pretty useless, although it is better if you have already done some searching/filtering - you might get 6 tags listed. I normally use either the main pop out tag list or the filter.

If you want to find notes that are tagged with one of more sub-tags within a main tag you select the main tag and use the drop down arrow from the blue tag lozenge. You can then choose to  "include sub-tags".

Despite all the issues with search and filtering, which don't seem to be a priority for the EN team, the advanced search syntax has continued to work perfectly. I therefore have AutoHotKey scripts that will take a tag from the sidebar, the main tag window or the tag area at the bottom of the note, convert it into tag:tag_name format and add it to the search. Just my way of trying to get EN to work as I want it to.

 

 

Thanks Mike,

That's fascinating.  I use ActiveWords which is a variant of AutoHotKey scripting and was therefore curious as to exactly how you conduct these searches.  So, in your case, if you want to search tag:Science and include all subtags for a particular search term, you have set this up such that you type the main tag, the search term and then hit a designated key? My issue is that whereas I too can set up a script I can't figure out how to allow the script to "include subtags".  For example, I have a main tag called "Travel" and it has 50 subtags eg" NY8-2024".  So if I want to look for notes involving "Hotel Lucerne" it returns zero notes if I use the parent tag "Travel" (because technically, that tag contains no notes at all).  The only way I will find "Hotel Lucerne" is if I use the technique you advised above (include subfolders).  I can't find it from the search bar because it seems as if there is no command that "includes subtags"

[idoc 413]

On a related note: I seem to recall in EN Legacy I could go to the dropdown list of Tags and highlight as many tags as I wanted (by Ctrl-click), put in a search term and it would then search for all notes containing that search term and all of those tags.  The current system is more cumbersome since I have to do it from the filter icon. 

Most of the time when I try to add multiple tags from the filter icon, it is cumbersome ie:I have to do it one at a time (I can't select multiple tags at one go).

Also, I noticed that if I search for a term with multiple tags selected and I don't get any hits, there is no way for me to add other tags.  The search is apparently over!  For example, in the below examples I searched for "flubby" using those 3 tags.  However, it didn't find anything.  Now, I remember that flubby is in the NY8-2024 tag; however, I can't add that at this point.  I literally have to hit "clear" on the upper right and I can now add other tags. 

 

 

[Mike P 2,980]

12 hours ago, idoc said:

Also, I noticed that if I search for a term with multiple tags selected and I don't get any hits, there is no way for me to add other tags. 

I think that is actually logical. Remember it's a filter. It is searching (filtering) for notes that contain tag a, b and c. If it doesn't find any there is no way that adding a further tag will find any. If you sequentially add tags, and it filters to zero tags, you can just cancel the last tag added by hitting the X on the blue tag lozenge. There is no need to cancel the entire search.

[Mike P 2,980]

12 hours ago, idoc said:

I can't find it from the search bar because it seems as if there is no command that "includes subtags"

I agree. This is an instance where the advanced search syntax doesn't work well. You need to either add every sub tag (with OR between or using the old any: command) or have a naming convention for your tags that allows the use of the wildcard character (as you noted in your original post).

You can actually copy the sub-tag names to the clipboard from the drop down in the blue tag lozenge. As an experiment I did write a script that prepended tag: to each one, added an any: and wrote it back to the clipboard so I could paste it into the search bar. If you do this you for a large number of tags you rapidly hit an EN limit for the number of characters allowed in a search. There again, you get the same failure if you try to use "include sub-tags" where there are a large number of tags.