Branch/search export and merge

[alx]

I'd like to start a separate thread on a feature I personally find very important for the scalability of a program like UltraRecall but as far as I know is not mentioned in the roadmap, even in the long term.

My suggestion is to provide the ability to export a part of the tree, be it a specific branch or a filtered (search results) view, as a separate UR database. In addition, there should be the possibility to "merge" another UR database into the one currently open, as a branch of the current tree. Personal Brain provides a similar functionality.

This way, a branch or category that grows out of proportion for practical navigation, can become a database of its own. Inversely, one can join several independent databases into a larger one if required.

I believe this will greatly enhance the program's versatility and potential for handling large databases.

You may want to take a look at how Sycon's IDEA!, which is also a one-document program, provides the ability to work with multiple databases:
http://sycon.de/eng/res/overview_id...ll_version.html
(See IDEA! Team Edition "Multi Database / Multi Tree" near the end of the page).

alx

This suggestion was originally submitted here:
http://www.kinook.com/Forum/showthread.php?threadid=1391&perpage=15&highlight=&pagenumber=2

[kevina]

This capability is currently available with Ultra Recall by copying or moving Info Items from one .urd file to another. You can either copy/cut and paste, or drag and drop from the source Info Database to the destination Info Database (.urd file) to split or merge .urd files. See this topic (http://www.kinook.com/UR/Manual/?interinfodatabasecopymove.htm) in the online help file for the details.

We do have adding this same functionality as import/export wizard options on our todo list, but this change would only be an added convenience since it is already available via the above method. As you mentioned, this would be a use for a filtered Data Explorer pane, as discussed in other forum threads.

[Leoram]

Kevina, I slightly dissagree with the approach of copy/move from one database to another in order to create a new database from a branch or from a list of documents. The reason is speed. Try for yourself for example moving some hundreds of Info Items from one DB to another and you'll see that it takes ages. Recently (just two days ago) I moved only slightly more than a hundred items and could go to sleep and have a dream. One more thing I noticed is that while I specifically used the "move" command, UR didn't really moved the items, instead they were copied although I saw a message box telling me they were being moved. I then had to manually delete all the documents in the source database, with the added inconvenience that it also took ages to delete all those items.

Leoram

[kevina]

Providing an alternative method to copy or move items from one database to another will not change the performance of the operation. We can look at the actual cross-database copy/move code to try to further optimize the performance, but in our tests, the time to copy or move seems reasonable.

All of our tests verify that Ultra Recall does honor cross-database "moving" -- in other words, the delete part of "move" operations does occur, and is undoable. Also, doing a cut then paste in a different database also functions as expected (the cut objects are deleted).

What steps did you use to "move" the Info Items? Can you reproduce the behavior of "moved" items not being deleted from the source Info Database? If so, please create a small sample source .urd and send it to support@kinook.com with instructions on how to reproduce and we'll take a look.