Sonny Software

Hello all,

Apologies if this should rather be a support query!

I'm attempting to do something that should be simple.
But I'm thinking I might be missing something obvious - alternatively, there is possibly a much easier way of achieving what I need, that I'm not seeing!

Hope someone can suggest/confirm some things.

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I have 1 attachments folder, that BE is pointed at.
All of the 2700-odd PDFs in this folder, are named with one of 3 possible prefixes - before the AuthorName_Title_Year.
As in "PrefixA_AuthorName_Title_Year" or "PrefixB_AuthorName_Title_Year" or "PrefixC_AuthorName_Title_Year".

In BE, I would like to have three Smart Groups set up, that list all of the references inside my BE library, based on these 3 prefixes - in other words, all the references with attachments that have PrefixA, inside Smart Group "PrefixA" etc.

As far as I can tell, I cannot get BE to search for those Prefixes - or rather, I wasn't able to get it to work properly.
I then realised that BE can search for Spotlight tags.
So I duly arranged Hazel to add the specific tags [TagPrefixA; TagPrefixB; TagPrefixC] to all of the attachments.
Hazel will also continue to watch that folder, and add the correct tags to any new files placed in it.

Am I on the right track? Or is there something far simpler to be done?

Assuming I am barking up the right tree - I have hit a snag.
Finder sees 495 files tagged with TagPrefixA.

Inside BE, I simply told the Smart Group to search "and tags", for TagPrefixA – and left all the other fields blank.
The Smart Group that BE displays, only contains 361 files.
What am I missing?

Lastly – am I correct in presuming that when new files tagged with TagPrefixA get added to the BE Attachments folder, that BE should 'update/refresh' the Smart Group?

Many thanks for any help!

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Update: I've just done the same to the 2nd category TagPrefixB.
339 instances in Finder, 291 instances displayed in the BE Smart Group...

Bookends only finds PDFs if they are in the default attachment folder, the Finder will find them anywhere (unless you restrict it). So the numbers can vary.

Also, Bookends won't find files that originally had a colon in the name (that the Finder changed to a slash), and if you're auto-naming that can happen. This is an unanticipated peculiarity of the FInder and the Spotlight APIs. It's fixed in the next update, 12.8.1.

Also, the way Bookends stores attachment names will change in the next update, and I suggest that you use SQL smart groups to locate the files there, not via Spotlight or Finder tags.

We plan to release 12.8.1 tomorrow, so download it then. The smart SQL group you'd want to create for "PrefixA" might be something like

attachments REGEX 'PrefixA'

That's off the top of my head, I haven't tested it. Try that and if it fails contact tech support.

Jon
Sonny Software

Jon wrote:Bookends only finds PDFs if they are in the default attachment folder, the Finder will find them anywhere (unless you restrict it). So the numbers can vary.

Also, Bookends won't find files that originally had a colon in the name (that the Finder changed to a slash), and if you're auto-naming that can happen. This is an unanticipated peculiarity of the FInder and the Spotlight APIs. It's fixed in the next update, 12.8.1.

Also, the way Bookends stores attachment names will change in the next update, and I suggest that you use SQL smart groups to locate the files there, not via Spotlight or Finder tags.

We plan to release 12.8.1 tomorrow, so download it then. The smart SQL group you'd want to create for "PrefixA" might be something like

attachments REGEX 'PrefixA'

That's off the top of my head, I haven't tested it. Try that and if it fails contact tech support.

Jon
Sonny Software

Thanks Jon, will give things a whirl in 12.8.1.