Windows : Sidebar: Smart Group and Rule Editor

Sidebar: Smart Group and Rule Editor

When you create or edit a smart group or smart rule, a sheet appears with options for specifying options, like the criteria to match or from where to match items.

Options

The top section of the sheet contains a mandatory name and search location, as well as a few optional items.

Name: Enter a name for the smart item.
Search in: Select where you want this smart item to search.
Exclude Subgroups: Enable this to ignore items in subgroups of the location selected in the Search in dropdown.

In the Comparison section, you will see these options:

Ignore Diacritics: Check this to treat letters with diacritics, e.g., umlauts or accented characters, the same as their regular counterparts.
Fuzzy: Check this to apply fuzzy logic to contents-based criteria, ignoring simple typos so that instances of "hello" and "hallo" are both found.
Highlight Occurrences: When used with contents-based matching, this will highlight the terms in the text of selected search results, if possible.

Predicates

The second section of the editor shows the search predicates. These define criteria you want to match. Criteria may be content- or attribute-related, e.g., documents containing a specific word or groups added this week.

Note: The predicate editor is also shown when using the Advanced options when searching your databases. It is also shown in a similar sheet when you run the Tools > Batch Process command.

The list of predicates consists of a list of blocks, each beginning with All or Any, defining whether all (Boolean AND) or any (Boolean OR) of the contained predicates need to be true for the document to be returned as a result. Predicates themselves consist of the field to search (like "Content" or "Tag"), and the condition and the data that needs to be matched.

Add as many criteria as you need. Use the + and - buttons to add more predicates to your smart group or to delete them. Predicates can be rearranged with drag-and-drop. Hold the ⌥ Option key and click a ... button to create a "compound predicate" also called "branch". Each branch also has its own All or Any option as well. This allows you to create very targeted searches.

Example:

To find all Microsoft Excel files use the condition Filename ... ends in ... xslx. To find items created in the last 7 days use the condition Date created ... is ... Last Week.

Note: In some predicates you can use wildcards, Boolean operators, phrases, and parenthesis, too. Read more...