Search Function: Greatest Common Parent. (AND + OR)

What: Search Fuction where resulting branches must have both values in their hierarchy (AND), but they don’t have to be in the same node (OR).

Could be further tweaked with operators to limit how many levels the values can be away from the GCP, or how many levels away the values can be from each other.

Why: In a List where ‘Smith, John’ has sub-nodes -Grade 11, -Student Council and -Glee Club, you couldn’t find him with an exclusive (AND) search for those three groups. You would have to use an OR search and then sort through all the results that turn up for Juniors, the SC and GC. Same problem if they were tags.

The other option is to pile everything into one node, or the note of one node… which kind of defeats the purpose of a list, doesn’t it?

4 Likes

I think @Bjarke_Ebert suggested the same thing in this Thread.

I fully support the introduction of an AND search operator that does exactly what you two describe: requiring the search terms be on the same branch but not necessary in the same node.

The OR search operator is already [implemented] (http://help.dynalist.io/article/93-search-operators-reference) and I use it as a replacement for AND as you describe.

Agreed, being able to search by attributes of parents would be a huge help. Dynalist provides something like this feature for completed items – that is, if an item’s ancestor is complete, then it’s complete. I’d love to see this behavior generalized for searching any attributes.

1 Like

You are completely right. We should include all searchable metadata of nodes in such a search; including attributes.

This would be even elegant because children would not have to actually inherit their parents’ attributes. A search would still produce the wanted results.