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Can I create Smart Lists to automatically include certain prefixes?

seankilleen says:
Hello all,

Love the product and am happy to be a pro user!

I'm looking for help with the following scenario:

I have two jobs, one for my employer and a company I own.

I label all the lists for company projects (some 15!) with the prefix "wkDak-". All of the projects for the company I own are labeled "wkPS-".

I would like to utilize a Smart List to see how many Next Actions (which I tag with "na") I have at a given time across all of my work lists. The problem, of course, is that this smart search would be very extensive. Plus, I'm always adding and removing projects at a pretty rapid pace. So, updating a smart search every time with this would prove very cumbersome.

So my question is: Is there any way to create a smart list that will return all items tagged with "na" that are in any list beginning with "wkDak-" ? I'm not sure if there's an attribute like "list:wkDak-*" that I could employ in this situation or not, but that would be phenomenal.

Thanks in advance for any help you can give!
Posted at 3:52pm on May 12, 2010
seankilleen says:
Exploring an alternative:

If wildcards for lists aren't available, should I create a list called "WkDak" for example, and make the projects into tags with "wkDak-" prefixes? The next step after that would be, I suppose, to create smart lists for projects that would auto-tag the task with the project name, but then for NA work tasks I'd still need to see all tags that were like "WkDak-*", so I'm not sure that's really an option.

Just trying to work through it out loud. Appreciate any input you can muster. :)
Posted 14 years ago
andrewski (Remember The Milk) says:
seankilleen,
Considering another alternative (like the latter idea you had), if you reorganize your projects as tags instead of lists, you could use the tagContains search operator.

Then, a Smart list like tagContains:wkDak- tag:na would be just what you're looking for.

And yes, Smart Lists for individual projects (e.g. tag:wkDak-123 list:WkDak) would assign those properties to any tasks added.

Hope this helps!
Posted 14 years ago
seankilleen says:
@andrewski -- thank you! Appreciate the help.

Is this also a confirmation that no similar feature exists for lists? (i.e. a "listContains" search operator)
Posted 14 years ago
andrewski (Remember The Milk) says:
seankilleen,
Yes, that's the case currently. Sorry for any inconvenience there.
Posted 14 years ago
This topic has now been closed automatically due to a lack of responses in the past 90 days.