Workspace filtering on tag wildcard, or new tagging system?

I try to use Drafts for both work and personal things, and want to use workspaces to help keep myself in those specific domains at specific times.

I just implemented a tagging system for work that covers various domains of my work life:
work
work/childtag
work/childtag/grandchildtag

Conceivably, as projects or new work domains arise, work/childtag2 might also emerge, and so on.

Ideally an item only has one tag. So work/childtag doesn’t also need to be tagged work.

However, it seems as though there is no way to filter a workspace on a wildcard such as “all drafts tagged with work*”, so as to to capture the work tag, and work/childtag and any new child or grandchild tags that might come about.

So if I want to create a workspace that contains all of my work-related drafts, it seems I need to either

  • Filter on every work-related tag, and add new tags to the filter as new domains generate new tags.
  • Tag everything with the bare work tag in addition to some other tag and just filter on work.

Is there a way to wildcard filter on tags and I’m just missing something?
If not, is there a more sane way to tag things to make them easier to accomplish what I’d like to a cocmplirh with workspaces, or am I perpetually double-tagging things and just filtering on the bare work tag?

Why are you using slashes to create single compound tags rather than adding each of the compound elements as separate tags? It looks like you are trying to impose a file structure onto individual tags in a tagging system.

If you add them separately, you can filter on the work tag. Having them as separate tags actually gives you way more flexibility.

The only benefits of putting what are separate tags into one that I can think of is having fewer tags to manage and fewer steps to add/rename/delete; but even that could be mitigated with a few custom actions if that was somehow a convenience deal breaker.

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hi @scottisloud,

i think i can help you there - i use a more or less similar approach for tagging (at least i use prefixes from the PARA system).
I created an action to update and apply a workspace automatically for each category but never published it…
Sorry for that :stuck_out_tongue: You can download the action from the directory but you need to configure the script to your exact needs (which is not complicated at all) if you need help just reach out again.

Yes I see that, and yes those are the benefits.

Like I said in the post, if I tag everything with the work tag, I can filter on that regardless of the other tags used.

However, as you say, the advantage to these compound tags is that the tags themselves are easier to organize. In theory I could get away with a single tag if I didn’t care about workspaces. Also, all work-related tags appear together in the tag list and are all easily accessible by autocomplete when typing a tag in the tag field (typing ‘work’ surfaces all work tags).

But in the absence of wildcard filtering it looks like I need to rethink my approach, which was the motivation for my post :slight_smile:

Thanks @FlohGro I’ll have to check that out.

Time for a rethink of my tags and I look forward to poking around that action you shared!

the action should work out of the box for you, besides you should check the preconfigured settings in the script of the action.
You’re workspace may have another name and the settings like sorting may differ but this sholudn’t be a big issue.

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