help with Search for files in selected media sets

[midavis]

I am trying the demo of Mac Retrospect 11.5 and have a question regarding the Restore>"Search for files in selected media sets" search functions.

The ANY, NONE, & ALL pop-up choices do not seem to work as expected (selecting one and having it "stick"), or as they typically work in other applications. Even with using the Option key and clicking the different + buttons it doesn't appear possible to set my searches as needed. I'm hoping this is just a problem of understanding on my part.

For example, how would you set Retrospect to search for any of several file names (ANY), and limit results (ALL) to those found with file names ending in ".tif"? The pop-ups do not allow a choice of the proper term, though nothing is grayed out as if unavailable. It seems illogical.

Any suggestions or help would be appreciated.

 

 

 

Mavericks 10.9.5

[midavis]

Thanks. All I'm interested in doing is to search for any possible hits from a list of file names, but limit all results with a single constraint such as file path, file name suffix, date, etc.

 

It just seems like a bug, being unable to set the pop-up options (ANY, NONE, ALL) as needed. Attached is a screenshot from another similar search field in HoudahSpot application which works normally.

[Mayoff]

It does look like creating a rule and doing a Restore>Find files respond differently in the UI. I am asking around to see if anyone has some suggestions. The screenshots you give are helpful.

[Mayoff]

Sorry Twickland. I accidentally deleted your post. it is below:

 

Retrospect has long behaved oddly in the top level of the search conditions, where one could never select anything but "Any." However, the latest version has introduced a serious bug where not only can you not change any of the nested conditions to what you want, but also the attempt to change the conditions seems to cause other search parameters to change randomly. This has to be fixed! Retrospect: Are you listening?

[bdunagan]

You're both quite right. It's confusing and has been since Mac v8.0. In Retrospect, the native rules UI (including the Restore Assistant's "Search for Files and Folders" UI) does not work like it does in other apps. While other apps (like Houdahspot and OS X Finder) rely on OS X native libraries to display the rule editor and use the resulting query to search data, Retrospect uses a cross-platform query language shared by the Windows product as well.

 

However, there is a mismatch between what Retrospect's query language supports compared to OS X's. Retrospect supports nesting queries with "OR" at the first level, "AND" at the second level, and "NOT" at the third level: (1 OR ((NOT 2) AND 3)) but not (1 AND (2 OR 3)) nor (1 AND (NOT 2)). So in the UI, only "Any" is supported at the first level; only "All" is supported at the second level; and only "Not" is supported at the third level. It's not possible to disable any elements of the dropdown (as it's a standard OS X UI element), so Retrospect maps certain selections to more complicated queries ("Any" > "Not" becomes "Any" > "All" > "Not") and also ignores unsupported selections.

 

In terms of @midavis's query, it's not possible to search for any of several filenames while limiting the results to an file ending.

 

There is a known UI bug that the Rules editor supports "Not" at the second level (despite being "All" > "Not" internally) whereas the "Search for Files and Folders" Restore Assistant search only supports "All" > "Not".

 

If you do find queries that should work according to the logic above but don't, please let us know, and we'll investigate them. You can find more general documentation about rules in our Mac User's Guide. Our Windows User's Guide includes screenshots of our custom UI (called selectors) on Windows.

 

We're very sorry for the confusion over the UI. We do plan to improve the experience with a custom rule editor UI in a future release.

[midavis]

Thank you for the full explanation, bdunagan. Glad to know I'm not simply going crazy.