Does the Search function work in this forum? I tried to search "find" and got "no topics or posts met your search criteria".
Is there a way to refine a search in the Simple search? For example, if I search for all files on a drive having XXX in their name, can I then search JUST the returned results for files that also have YYY in their name?
John Land
Looks like find is considered a keyword by the forum's search facility. It's better than nothing and often good enough but can also be quite limited sometimes. That's phpbb.
If the built-in search isn't working for a particular query it's often better to use Google, restricting it to just this site. To find things with "find" in them on this site you would put this into Google: site:resource.dopus.com find
Probably still needs a few more keywords to narrow it down, though.
No, at least not at the moment. You're effectively asking to be able to search inside a File Collection which isn't allowed and doesn't work at the moment. (There is an obscure way to trick Opus into doing it, but you won't get back meaningful results.)
At least if the search was local, you may often find that doing a second search on the same files is quite quick since the directories are all cached in memory. Only problem is working out a query which combines your two searches into one. Looking for names with XXX or YYY is easy, but if you want XXX and YYY I think it's a case where the Advanced mode will be easier than the Simple mode.
I wonder if it would be useful to have a button which turns your current Simple query into an Advanced one for further editing? Would that do the job for you? You could then click + and add one extra clause without all the legwork of adding the stuff you had already defined.
Leo, thanks for the suggestons and info.
I've partially solved my problem by first searching for XXX, and then using the Lister Filter field to sub-search ZZZ.*
This allows me to do several sub-searches on any collection, which is useful for my purposes.
John Land
Ah, of course! I didn't think of that.
Leo, a follow-up question: is there a way to save a collection, so that I don't have to redo the search every time I exit and then restart DO?
John Land
Use the Find Panel (not the standalone Find window), accessible from the Tools menu. On that dialog you can type a new File Collection name in the Results field. After you run your search, be sure to go back to the Find Panel and change the File Collection name so that future searches do not clobber your File Collection.
You can also copy the Find Results File Collection to a different file collection name.
Leo, sorry for being dense, but I'm still missing something here.
I did name my search results (about 63K hits) as "Test".in the Find Panel I exit DO. Now, in a later session (but with no intervening searches), I want the previous search results named "Test" to show in the lister panel, so that I can use the Show Filter to subsearch on them. Just selecting Results as "Test" again from the dropdown menu does nothing. So how do I load the saved collection back into the Lister, so that (if the filter is cleared) all 63K files show up without having to redo the original search?
John Land
Select Go -> File Collections from the menus and you'll see a list of collections which should include your Test.
When viewing that list you can rename, copy and delete collections if you need to.
Leo, thanks. I note that reloading a collection via Go does not actually reload a saved collection (as in "saved results from a prior search"), it just reiniates a search using saved parameters. I was hoping to not have to spend the several minutes such a search requires (over 3 disks, all of them USB connected) and just open a saved file of search results, which I could then filter. Not to be, I guess.
John Land
No, that's not correct. Collections are not tied to the search that generated them - there is no "link" back to the original search parameters. Once you have files in a collection they stay there until they are removed or the collection is deleted.
OK, I did some tests, and you are right -- OP is not re-searching my external disks. HOWEVER, this particularly collection is about 7.33 MB in size, and it takes OP about as long to read and display it as the original search (I tested). I can hear the disk churning (and this disk is internal, not on USB). So it's 6 of one, half of dozen of the other as to what I do: reload this collection, or regenerate it.
John Land
That disk access is Opus re-populating fields like Description and image dimensions. I think Opus may also confirm that the files still exist and the sizes/dates are still accurate as well (not sure there).
If you have the Description column on or any other which causes Opus to look inside the files -- not just at their filesystem attributes -- then you might want to turn them off to avoid the disk access. (It should happen in the background but it can still be annoying if you don't care about the info.) You can set a folder format for Collections which will be inherited by all other collections which means you only need to remove the columns in one place.
I'm just collecting basic directory info -- path, date-time, size, attributes. I don't look for or display any content or other metadata.
If DO does a verify, as you suggest, then that's what's causing the delay -- the confirmation takes as long to do as a regenerate. Would be nice if the verify could be turned off.
John Land
[quote]If the built-in search isn't working for a particular query it's often better to use Google, restricting it to just this site. To find things with "find" in them on this site you would put this into Google: Code:
site:resource.dopus.com find [/quote]
This might be a useful button for this purpose:
Iexplore "http://www.google.com/search?q={dlgstring|Enter search term/s}&as_sitesearch=resource.dopus.com"[quote="johnfland"]I'm just collecting basic directory info -- path, date-time, size, attributes. I don't look for or display any content or other metadata.
If DO does a verify, as you suggest, then that's what's causing the delay -- the confirmation takes as long to do as a regenerate. Would be nice if the verify could be turned off.
John Land[/quote]
If you are displaying the size field, and have enabled sizes for folders (in Folder Options/Formats), then Opus will recurse through all folders to get the folder sizes. I believe Opus also needs to peek inside folders to get thumbnails from any image files inside. There is an option for that behavior in Preferences.
Opus 8 doesn't cache file information (attributes/size/timestamps) for local files in collections, only network/ftp files. So it's probably just the time taken to actually read all that information for so many files. Unfortunately there's no way around this at the moment - the next major version of Opus will cache this information for all collection files and so should speed things up dramatically.