Auto-select child tags on, but now how do I search for a word?

[lisec 283]

I played around with "Automatically select child-tags" and I'm liking this new way of doing things, but I can't for the life of me figure out why it might be useful.

I assumed that part of the charm of selecting the child tags was to quickly limit a search to items that include those tags.  In the attached picture, I show how I selected the parent "Appetizers & Sides" to quickly get all files tagged with "appetizer" or "bread" or "tapas", etc. (181 files).

Now that all those appetizers and sides were selected, I wanted to search for the word salami within those files.  That isn't what happened when I added the word "salami" to my search.  Instead it showed those same 181 files tagged with the children and then it added all files in the entire database that include the word salami (63), giving me a total of 239 files.

If you can't search within the selection, what is the point of selecting those child-tags?

[CalS 5,280]

17 hours ago, lisec said:

I played around with "Automatically select child-tags" and I'm liking this new way of doing things, but I can't for the life of me figure out why it might be useful.

I assumed that part of the charm of selecting the child tags was to quickly limit a search to items that include those tags.  In the attached picture, I show how I selected the parent "Appetizers & Sides" to quickly get all files tagged with "appetizer" or "bread" or "tapas", etc. (181 files).

Now that all those appetizers and sides were selected, I wanted to search for the word salami within those files.  That isn't what happened when I added the word "salami" to my search.  Instead it showed those same 181 files tagged with the children and then it added all files in the entire database that include the word salami (63), giving me a total of 239 files.

If you can't search within the selection, what is the point of selecting those child-tags?

You need to change the Any in your search to All if you want only notes within those tags that contain Salami.  The Any finds notes with those tags and any other notes that contain Salami.  That will shrink the number of notes in the second search set.

[lisec 283]

4 minutes ago, csihilling said:

You need to change the Any in your search to All if you want only notes within those tags that contain Salami.  The Any finds notes with those tags and any other notes that contain Salami.  That will shrink the number of notes in the second search set.

csihilling

 

csihilling, thanks for the reply. That's the first thing I tried - I should have mentioned that in my post. Changing it from "Any" to "All" provides 0 results because it is looking for notes that are tagged with all of the selected tags.

[CalS 5,280]

You are welcome.  My bad for missing your initial point.    If the word salami is not included in all of the 181 notes, 0 would be the result. 

Yeah, the inheritance search really just gets you a list of all the notes in the tag family, not much refining of the search to be done after that, probably more results sorting.

[lisec 283]

It's an odd feature then, isn't it?  I mean I include the tag "recipes" in all of my recipes so that I can quickly search for tag:recipes tag:Christmas "turkey" to quickly get at my Christmas recipes.  So when I saw that I might be able to avoid adding the "recipes" tag to all my recipes I thought wow, this is fantastic.  That's when I discovered that I wouldn't be able to manually search within all my recipes because there is no way to replicate clicking on a tag parent (with 'select children' set to on) when doing a manual search, and worse, if I did click on the parent I wouldn't be able to narrow the search.

I really do have to confess that shy of showing how many notes are in a parent I can't figure out what this function is supposed to do.  Is it a bug that we can't search within that selection? Is this functionality obviously necessary for some other thing that I'm not aware of?

 

 

[CalS 5,280]

15 hours ago, lisec said:

It's an odd feature then, isn't it?  I mean I include the tag "recipes" in all of my recipes so that I can quickly search for tag:recipes tag:Christmas "turkey" to quickly get at my Christmas recipes.  So when I saw that I might be able to avoid adding the "recipes" tag to all my recipes I thought wow, this is fantastic.  That's when I discovered that I wouldn't be able to manually search within all my recipes because there is no way to replicate clicking on a tag parent (with 'select children' set to on) when doing a manual search, and worse, if I did click on the parent I wouldn't be able to narrow the search.

I really do have to confess that shy of showing how many notes are in a parent I can't figure out what this function is supposed to do.  Is it a bug that we can't search within that selection? Is this functionality obviously necessary for some other thing that I'm not aware of?

Can't help you with the reasoning behind it, though I believe the functionality was added for those who create hierarchical parent/child tag structures.  I don't, I use parent tags for organization, not inheritance.  This is another case where a Boolean search capability would be great to have in EN.

In your recipe case do you need to do a compound search with the recipe tag or will tag:Christmas chicken work?  And can you use tag:recipe chicken to find any chicken recipe?  Alternatively, though I'm not much for adding notebooks, add a notebook for recipes and lose the recipe tag.  Then do your recipe searches in the context of the recipe notebook.  Just some thoughts, FWIW. 

[jefito 5,589]

On 8/20/2016 at 5:30 PM, lisec said:

I played around with "Automatically select child-tags" and I'm liking this new way of doing things, but I can't for the life of me figure out why it might be useful.

According to the hover text for the setting in the Options dialog: "Check this option if you want child tags to be automatically selected when you select a parent tag in the left panel or the Tag Picker. This allows you to display notes associated with the child tags when the parent tag is selected". The idea is to let you pick a parent tag, and all the notes that have that tag or any of its subtags (I don't know whether this includes children of its children; exercise left for the reader , but I'm guessing that it does) are displayed (the default "All" search is turned into an "Any" search as a side-effect.

Practically, what this means is that you can take advantage of your tag hierarchy without needing to tag notes with the whole line of succession up the tag tree; you only need to add the leaf tag: you can identify all of the notes that have a tag in a particular subtree by clicking on one tag (the subtree parent). This may or may not be helpful to some users and may lead to unwelcome surprises if you're using the tag picker with this on, and select a tag that has children (these aren't specially marked in the tag picker, which presents a flat list).

[lisec 283]

EDIT:  My response was to csihilling. Didn't see Jeff's response until later.

Ha! We think alike.  I don't use notebooks much either. I have one main one, 1 local one, and a few shared ones.

My recipes already are in their own notebook, because that is the only way to share them with my kitchen tablet¹ but you can't select a Notebook and then filter by tags in Android. If we could most of my issues would be solved.

As you suggest I could always just search for what I need:  "tag:Christmas turkey" but for 2 things. First, searches in Android don't work properly. I never ever get all the results I am supposed to get (I think I saw some threads about this).  Second, and this has nothing to do with Evernote, my tablet is the designated recipes tablet, and as such it is in its own plugged in stand on the wall and using the search box is extremely awkward. Pushing buttons, selecting tags and swiping things is easy.

Since searching is a pain and I can't select tags after selecting a Notebook, my only solution was to use tags exclusively, Now I just select the "recipes" parent tag and then as many children as I want. There are a few issues with this system as well, but that's for another time. 

I've strayed off topic, but I thought it was important to provide a very real-world example of the limitations at work, and how they can be overcome. But hey, all of this is particular to Android. On my desktop I pretty much exclusively use search. No problem finding anything there.

 

¹ Of course I could just login with my own account thereby avoiding a shared notebook, but then everyone would have access to all my Evernote files (local folder excepted) and that is out of the question. It would be great if I could limit the tablet's access to just "all files tagged with recipes" but that isn't an option. So I have to use a separate Evernote account and share a folder with it.

 

 

[CalS 5,280]

27 minutes ago, jefito said:

Practically, what this means is that you can take advantage of your tag hierarchy without needing to tag notes with the whole line of succession up the tag tree; you only need to add the leaf tag: you can identify all of the notes that have a tag in a particular subtree by clicking on one tag (the subtree parent).

For sure.  I think @lisec's point was not being able to search within the ANY result.  You get a nice list of all the parent/child notes but your only additional manipulation is via sorting the results. She was in the not helped much category I suppose.

[CalS 5,280]

21 minutes ago, lisec said:

My recipes already are in their own notebook, because that is the only way to share them with my kitchen tablet¹ but you can't select a Notebook and then filter by tags in Android. If we could most of my issues would be solved.

Ouch.  Now I get it thanks.

[jefito 5,589]

19 minutes ago, lisec said:

But hey, all of this is particular to Android.

If you haven't already, I'd suggest adding a comment/feature request to the Android Product Feature subforum.

[lisec 283]

10 minutes ago, csihilling said:

For sure.  I think @lisec's point was not being able to search within the ANY result.  You get a nice list of all the parent/child notes but your only additional manipulation is via sorting the results. She was in the not helped much category I suppose.

Exactly. Do you think this is something I should present to Evernote as a bug or a feature request?

Not sure what the last sentence means.

[lisec 283]

15 minutes ago, jefito said:

If you haven't already, I'd suggest adding a comment/feature request to the Android Product Feature subforum.

Turns out these limitations might apply to the web as well. I just tried to select 2 tags and couldn't do it. That comment/feature request just got more complicated.

[CalS 5,280]

 

16 minutes ago, lisec said:

Exactly. Do you think this is something I should present to Evernote as a bug or a feature request?

Not sure what the last sentence means.

IMO, this is more of a feature request for Boolean search - notes with ANY of these tags AND salami in the text.  This has been requested of EN quite a few times and there may be an enhancement thread that you could up vote.  The last sentence just meant that automatically selecting child tags didn't help you in your use case.

8 minutes ago, lisec said:

Turns out these limitations might apply to the web as well. I just tried to select 2 tags and couldn't do it. That comment/feature request just got more complicated.

Yeah, more complicated.  On the web you can get a multi tag search but you have to type tag:tag1 tag:tag2 into the search bar.  You can enhance the search with text after you have a search result, but you can't add tags to the search at that point.  AFAIK.  Weird.

[jefito 5,589]

16 minutes ago, lisec said:

Turns out these limitations might apply to the web as well. I just tried to select 2 tags and couldn't do it. That comment/feature request just got more complicated.

I'd call this a feature request. Better to keep things device/client specific -- I know that Evernote staff patrol all forums here, and log requests, etc., but if I'm a developer working on the Android client, and I see stuff like that, I'm going to probably be thinking about the problem: design / implications / whatnot. In general -- and at Evernote, too, I believe --developers don't always set priorities, but sometimes itches get scratched regardless...