Exclusion search not working for parent nodes

Bugs
1

Probably this is not a bug, but when I try to make an exclusion search (-), the parents nodes that contain the excluded word are not excluded if the child nodes don’t contain that term. This is quite frustrating, because in this way the exclusion search only excludes the last row of bullets that contain the excluded word, still showing all the parent bullets that contain that term.

Es: if I try to exclude John (“-John) from this structure:

  • John lives in Tennessee
    • John has a nice family
    • Mary lives in Oklahoma

The result will be the following:

  • John lives in Tennessee
    • Mary lives in Oklahoma

Still showing john in the first bullet

Is there a way to change this behavior?

2

I believe John lives in Tennessee is included only because it is the the parent of Mary lives in Oklahoma, The hierarchy is displayed for found nodes,

No matter the name in the parent node it will appear if any descendant matches the search.

1 Like
4

Sounds like you would like to have flat searches, where only the results (and not the hierarchy) is displayed.

There is a bookmarklet for this: FlatFlowy Bookmarklet for WorkFlowy | flatflowy

1 Like
5

exactly, which is a kind of broad interpretation of exclusion search, which can be fine, but it would be very useful to provide also the possibility to do exclusion searches excluding every element (including descendants) which contains a certain word.

6

thanks EricA, unfortunately the bookmarklet doesn’t solve the problem, the “erroneous” results seen in the normal search appear also in the flattened search

1 Like
7

The search looks for a specific node that matches the search criteria. There are also nested searches that first look for a parent node that matches criteria A, and then for children nodes within them that match criteria B.

At least currently, the negative search works for node level search, but not for nested searches. And it looks like that is exactly what you are trying to do: only look inside nodes that are NOT something for the nodes that are also NOT that something themselves.