Feature request

Talk, speculate, discuss, pontificate. As long as it pertains to Hazel.

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Feature request Wed Aug 15, 2012 10:05 pm • by akadmon
Please please please -- can you add ability to sort rules by name/date modified? With dozens of rules applied to a folder, I find it difficult to find the one I need to edit
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Re: Feature request Thu Aug 16, 2012 12:39 pm • by Mr_Noodle
The rule order is important so reordering them based on name would screw things up. If you have that many rules, you may want to take a step back and see if you can consolidate them. I suggest searching the help for "match patterns" as a possible way to do that.
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Re: Feature request Fri Aug 17, 2012 2:16 am • by akadmon
Mr_Noodle wrote:The rule order is important so reordering them based on name would screw things up. If you have that many rules, you may want to take a step back and see if you can consolidate them. I suggest searching the help for "match patterns" as a possible way to do that.


Sorting the rules by name is only meant for display/search purposes. It doesn't have to affect the rule order behind the scenes (i.e., Hazel can keep the order independent of the user's rule display preferences).
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Re: Feature request Fri Aug 17, 2012 12:24 pm • by Mr_Noodle
That may be too confusing for people and will also make people not recognize the importance of ordering. Again, it might be worth looking into why you have so many rules as most of the time, I find that there's a common pattern that makes it unnecessary.
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Re: Feature request Thu Aug 23, 2012 11:30 pm • by akadmon
Mr_Noodle wrote:That may be too confusing for people and will also make people not recognize the importance of ordering. Again, it might be worth looking into why you have so many rules as most of the time, I find that there's a common pattern that makes it unnecessary.


I use Hazel as part of my paperless workflow (big thanks to David Sparks). All my scanned and OCR'd documents go into a single folder (Scans). My Hazel rules look for certain words in the files, rename them (e.g. "2012-08-23 - Dining - Chez Pannise") and move them to the appropriate folder (e.g. "Scans/Receipts/Dining). With dozens of categories and subcategories, I have dozens of dozens of rules, all acting on the Scans folder. I don't see any way around it, other than doing the categorizing prior to scanning, which would significantly impact the efficiency of the whole process. Or am I missing something about how Hazel works?
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Re: Feature request Fri Aug 24, 2012 2:19 pm • by Mr_Noodle
Can't say for sure without seeing the rules, but since you are going off of a file's contents, you can't use pattern matching anyways. I guess in this case, the only real way to generalize is to use a script of some sort. In the meantime, I'll think about somehow working custom tokens into this; like have a custom token that matches the text of a "contains" when matching the context.
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Re: Feature request Wed Mar 13, 2013 4:56 pm • by mcheck
I'll think about somehow working custom tokens into this; like have a custom token that matches the text of a "contains" when matching the context.


This would be fantastic. I am setting up Hazel in exactly this way, to examine contents of files. A custom token for "contains" would be perfect for naming based on OCR'd PDF contents.

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Re: Feature request Sat Dec 21, 2013 11:50 pm • by AustinMan_w/no_Plan
I too wish there were an option to sort Rule Names -- or for that matter search to find a rule. Even if there was a warning that this will re-order the execution.
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Re: Feature request Mon Dec 23, 2013 3:30 pm • by Mr_Noodle
I think it would be more useful if you describe your specific case. Many times, people have way too many rules that can be condensed into a few (or even one). I suggest posting specifics about your situation in this case.
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Re: Feature request Mon Dec 23, 2013 3:53 pm • by AustinMan_w/no_Plan
It could be too many rules, but here is the case. In the process of converting paper files to electronic.

Rule sets identify the statement company, date, account, etc. Then renames the file and then moves into a staging folder to be filed.

The rule sets on the staging folder, identify the file based on name and then.
a) runs a script to upload to evernote into the correct notebook and with relevant tags. (Example - items in fiscal year 2011, have the tag FY2011. The file might be named 2011-11-30-CityWater.pdf.
b) moves the file based on the name to \xxx\CityWater or something similar

There could be 3 or 4 tags included in the script to upload into evernote.

Finally as I write new rules, they are more efficient than the ones I created early on but still remain in use.
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Re: Feature request Thu Dec 26, 2013 1:43 pm • by Mr_Noodle
Are you not able to use match patterns/custom tokens to condense this a bit? Are there other common patterns you can exploit here?
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Re: Feature request Thu Dec 26, 2013 1:55 pm • by AustinMan_w/no_Plan
Can one use a match token in the AppleScript that creates the Evernote item with tags? If the token equaled X then set the tag to Y?
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Re: Feature request Fri Dec 27, 2013 4:39 pm • by Mr_Noodle
AppleScripts can export tags back to Hazel, but not the reverse, at the moment.
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