(Archived) OS X and Windows clients do not behave the same with respect to searches

[mklement0 3]

It seems that  as of Evernote 5.0.6 on OS X and Evernote.exe/ENScript.exe 4.6.4.8136, the OS X and Windows clients do not behave the same with respect to searches.

 

Some searches return results on OS X, but not on Windows:

 

Example: I have a note with title To-dos for cross-platform Kakooma apps. If I use that exact title without double quotes as the search phrase (though it won't be used as such and parsed into separate search tokens), the OS X client finds the note, whereas the Windows clients do NOT.

 

The inconsistency is related to the hyphenated words: if both such words in the title are double-quoted (or the phrase as a whole is double-quoted), the note is found again, i.e., the following both work

• "To-dos" for "cross-platform" Kakooma apps 
  
• "To-dos for cross-platform Kakooma apps"
  

 

The Windows clients do not support the 'recoType' attribute.

 

For instance, searching for recoType:* - to retrieve all notes with ANY kind of OCR-treated attachments - yields NO search results on Windows (7) - on OS X (10.8.3) it does.

[jefito 5,598]

It is known that the various clients have inconsistencies in their handling of various searches. You should consider opening a support request for this.

[mklement0 3]

Thanks, @jefito - I've already reported this issue by email, but thought I'd let others know the status quo, since the relevant API-doc page, http://dev.evernote.com/documentation/cloud/chapters/search_grammar.php, doesn't mention it.

[jefito 5,598]

Yeah, the search grammar is certainly used by searches that actually use the Evernote API to filter your notes, but I believe that clients can do their own interpreting of search strings and do the filtering locally (which should be faster since you don't need to round-trip to the servers for search results, and also covers the case when the client is not connected to the internet), and that's where the differences lie. They can't share the same code to do the interpretation, since they are written in different languages on the different clients.

[mklement0 3]

Thanks for the explanation, make sense.

 

While the various clients may not be able to share code directly, you would still expect them to *behave* the same - and that's what the current doc claims.

Achieving that is clearly non-trivial and is an ongoing maintenance challenge, and it's conceivable that certain functionality can for *technical* reasons not be implemented consistently.

However, I don't think that's the case here. In the short term, a note in the doc would help.

[jefito 5,598]

While the various clients may not be able to share code directly, you would still expect them to *behave* the same - and that's what the current doc claims.

Yep, definitely.

Achieving that is clearly non-trivial and is an ongoing maintenance challenge, and it's conceivable that certain functionality can for *technical* reasons not be implemented consistently.

However, I don't think that's the case here. In the short term, a note in the doc would help.

Agree.