Lock specific folders/files to the top of a lister, regardless of sort order

Help & Support
21

I am a developer with almost 50 years experience (Leo knows this - I've been using DOpus since v1). I understand the logic fully. And I know how to get a directory listing and manipulate it. We are not using computers from the 70s... this is not intense CPU stuff. Having said that, there's a lot of similarly named stuff in here, and I don't live in DOpus settings, so forgive me for having chosen the wrong feature. I bought the upgrade to 13 because two issues I had (not including this one) were suggested to be working in 13, but neither are. So, while exploring new things in 13, I decided I wanted to do this. I woudl have upgraded regardless, but, I was inspired based on expectations to do it sooner.

As for this topic.... the direction of "Use a Folder label" is not sufficient...

Labels > Label Assignments > In Specific Folders
Add Wildcard

Enter folder path wildcard pattern: This might mean F:\ or it might mean ^F:\.+$ I chose the latter, because it is specifially what the prompt is asking. Click OK

Now I see the same requester with a new section below for Assigned Labels.
+New > Wildcard Label

Now it's asking me again for a wildcard... I've already given this. So I guess I should have used F:\ only in last step. There's no need for two wildcards, so I abandon this and start over.

Labels > Label Assignments > In Specific Folders
Add Folder
F:\

Now I'm back where I was a minute ago, but this path makes more sense so far.
+New > Wildcard Label

This is defaulting to "Match Full Path" for the wildcard, though I've already specified the Path specifically, with no wildcard. I turn that off, at this point it should just wildcard the part after F:.
It's also defaulting to "Files and Folders" even though we started this path telling it Folders. so I change that. I set Label to Pinned.

So, I thought, well what happens if I go back the first route I took...

Add Wildcard

Enter folder path wildcard pattern: This time I put F:\

Now I'm back to the same place as the last route. It's got Use Wildcards selected as defaul for the F:. I know now that that is wrong. So I turn that off.

+New > Wildcard Label

At this point, I'm back where I was last path... so I do the same steps.

Now I've got two entries under Folders. Both say F:\ but one has a question mark on the icon. I think they are both the same, but who knows. I delete this one. the other seems like the more correct one.

One can see how very confusing this could be for someone not having used it before.

The end result though... this approach appears to be working.

22

PS: That's not meant to sound pissed off, if it did. I'm not.

23

When you go to Labels > Label Assignments > In Specific Folders, it means you want to assign labels to specific folders and inside this folder to specific files/folders.
For example, you want all subfolders of D:\SOME\PATH that are named *_A_TAG_* to get a specific label.
Then the first pattern is here to let you specify you want markers in D:\SOME\PATH (and it can be named with regexp or wildcards if you choose so).
And the second pattern (for the label selection) is to specify what files/folders it will be applied.
And for that specific folder, you can have multiple labels for different criterias; so it is a list.

Depending on your specific use case, it may be possible to achieve the same result with different combination of first starting with a specific folder or using a regexp to define it, and then using different types of label assignment criterias.
It looks like this is what happened when you ended up with two entries apparently leading to the same result.

24

I think this is a good place to add in some more of the little help sections at the top fo the prefs requester. The one for this area, isn't too clear.

25

One is a wildcard and one is just a name or path.

If you just want to label a specific path, you don't need to do it via "In Specific Folders" (although you can, it just complicates things).

The label shown in my screenshot above is done via Label Assignments, not the In Specific Folders below that.

The manual explains both Preferences pages, as well as the different label types, in detail if anything is unclear.