Add "Limit search to parents siblings" option

[xja]

The "Limit search to siblings of current search item" is very useful. It would be handy to be able to also include siblings of the parent of the search item as well, so that you could put the all of your Search items under a particular parent item (I often have many sibling search items) within a Folder linked to that parent item.

eg, in the case below, Search1, Search2, and Search3 would search all children (and their children) of Project A, as opposed to just children of Searches.

Project A
|
|-Searches
| |_Search1
| |_Search2
| |_Search3
|
|_Tasks
| |_Task1
| |_Task2
| |_Task3|
|
|_Mail
|
|_Contacts

[prf5]

XJA - I see that you've contributed to "creating views" thread, and I'm whether the feature you are requesting could be implemented easily if you had the ability to create a view and confine your search to the items in the view.

[xja]

Originally posted by prf5
XJA - I see that you've contributed to "creating views" thread, and I'm whether the feature you are requesting could be implemented easily if you had the ability to create a view and confine your search to the items in the view.

I don't think this would quite achieve what I am talking about.

I guess if you had the ability to have Search results showed in the tree, then you could do 1 Search to filter the tree and define that search such that it included Search1, Search2, and Search3, and then Search1, Search2, and Search3 would have to be able to be applied to all items shown in the tree rather than all items in the database. However, this would make it a two step process.

As it is now, you could define Search1, for instance, to include a [i]criteria[i] that effectively limits it to parent's siblings (the same effect as doing what is described above). However, that is not always so easy to construct.

So, in other words, I would still consider this a separate (and probably simpler) feature request from the one in the Creating Views thread.

[xja]

I thought of a better (although not necessarily easier) way to implement this. Instead of having the current option "Limit search to siblings of current search item" and then adding ANOTHER option to "Limit search to parents siblings," just have a user option to "Limit search to children of a specified InfoItem" and then allow the user to specify to which InfoItem the search should be applied. The default when the option is enabled would be the parent of the search item, which in effect limits search to siblings.

[jpmnh]

I'm playing with the GTD template to get it to how I do things. I'm thinking I want a "Limit search to children of the current search item" -- but I dont see how to do it...

I'm using a layout like this:
Home search
|
|_Inside search
| |_Task1
| |_Task2
| |_Task3
|
|_Outside search
| |_Task1
| |_Task2

Where Home search, Inside search and Outside search are all searches to find next action tasks from their respective points in the tree down. So Home finds everything in Inside and Outside. Inside finds only tasks under Inside, and Outside finds only tasks under outside...
I dont see how to do this without adding another placeholder layer to the tree, as the only choices appear to be "search everything" or "limit search to siblings of the current search item"; So my current scheme with the extra layer looks like this:

Home
| |Home search
| |Inside
| | |Inside search
| | | |_Task1
| | | |_Task2
| | | |_Task3|
|
| |Outside
| | |Outside search
| | | |_Task1
| | | |_Task2


Is there a way to avoid this extra layer and just do a "limit search to children of this item"?

[jpmnh]

I'll reply to my own thread.. I found a solution.
The Lineage virtual attrib has the list of parents in it seperated by /
So I added to my search criteria for "@Inside":
and lineage matches wildcard */@Inside*

Works like a charm.