Search has:date Parent Has Date

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#1

If I’m searching for dated items, and the parent of the item has a date, is there a way I can get a Dynalist search to treat the item as if it had a date?

e.g. I’ve got a top-level item “Annual Battery Replacement” and it has 20 child items listing each battery I’m supposed to replace. I put a date on the “Annual Battery Replacement”. Logically, that means I’ve put a date on all of the 20 children. But I can’t find a way to make Dynalist treat the children as if they were dated.

How can I accomplish something like has:date and have it include items with dated parents?

Also, how can I accomplish something like -has:date and have it include items that don’t have a date AND the parent doesn’t have a date?

#2

I don’t think that’s possible right now. parent:keyword is available but it’s for keyword searching and not compatible with has:date. Sorry!

#3

@Susan_Kleinfelter
If I understand you correctly, I believe You can do all these things.

Since adding a date always results in “!(20” being included in the beginning of any modern date entry, you can treat it like text in your search~filter. (The referenced date format is based on how I currently have my own set, adjust for how yours in your settings.)

Caveats

  • augment the below post per the following for now: presently not possible to use spaces with search operators ancestor: or parent: (I did not test using %20 for space replacement, but I think it wont work in the search bar)
  • when using proposed date solution, you may need to copy/paste the date per the note below.

So therefore, for targetting battery replacements you could try
Doc
Annual Battery Replacement !(2020-07-21)

  • Batt1
  • Batt2
  • etc

Use Filters like:
parent: “Annual Battery Replacement !(20”
OR
parent: “Annual Battery Replacement” parent: “!(2”
etc

…and you can fill out the date as much as you wish beyond !(2 for narrowing it down per year/month/day/time in the entry

!NOTE! -you may need to copy/paste the date you want from and entry into the searchbar -simply typing it in may have null result (don’t know why, but I observed this in myh tests)

Note2: Dont’ forget, for nested children, grab them by using “ancestor:” vs “parent:”

FOR Does not have date and parent does not have date, simply try employing the use of…
-!(20 OR -parent:!(20
-!(20 AND -parent:!(20
-!(20 OR -ancestor:!(20
-!(20 AND -ancestor:!(20
…adjusting for whatever logic you are working on.

I hope this helps ;^)
Twohawks

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#4

@HTHawks, That’s pretty good. It covers some of my needs quite well.

The parent:“Annual Battery Replacement” appears not to work. Combining a quoted string with parent or ancestor doesn’t look like it is implemented. parent:annual works, but not parent:“annual” or parent:“annual battery”.

Thanks for the suggestions. The use of !(20 to search for dates is quite clever.

#5

Glad it helped some. Yeah, I just discovered on the boards somewhere here… presently you cannot use spaces in parent: / ancestor: search params. I will edit my original post to reflect this.
Cheers,
Twohawks

#6

Yeah, that’s a limitation of the search function. I use searches like “parent:Today parent:#status” to find children of the node named “Today #status”.

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