Category "Concatenation"

[harrylah]

Hi all,
I have a question on how I would best achieve results:
Imagine I have a category (or keyword) date system like

2015
  02
    01
    02
  03
    18
    19

I would like to create another set of keywords/categories in the form
20150201
20150202
20150318
20150319

Simply put, I'd lke to concatenate all levels/children of a given node/parent into one level. How would I best schieve that?

Thanks,

Harry

[Mario]

Hi, welcome to the community.

I'm not sure that I understand exactly what you are trying to achieve.
You speak of keywords and categories. This may mean totally different things!

To create a category '20150201' somewhere in your category tree you could:

1. Create the category and make it an Alias of "2015|02|01"
-or-
2. Create the category and use a category formula which refers to "2015|02|01"

This is easy to do with IMatch categories.

It is impossible with keywords, though. This is where your post is unclear. Do you want to assign a keyword "20150201" to all files which have the hierarchical 2015|02|01 keyword? I doubt there is an easy way to achieve that, except some regular expression logic and a Metadata Template...

[Ferdinand]

Harry is an old timer from the 3.6 days.  Good to see you here Harry!!   Welcome.

I don't understand your request either, but we'll do our best to help you.  Have you looked at the timeline view in IMatch 5?   It may do what you want.

[harrylah]

Hi guys, yes, I'm a yery old hand indeed. I registered IMatch in back in 2002, IIIRC, started excited with pretty much a DB view and a category view and am now in the wonderful world of automagic XMP population from whatever metadata repository. File sizes grew from a couple of hundred k to mid 20 M per file, now with automagic version handling (thanks, Ferdinand, for your script, saved me years of manual assigning!) and so forth and now I struggle with what I used to call string contatenation in my VBA times! :-)
Unfortunately my photographic skill didn't nearly evolve as IMatch did, but then hey, for me it's still just hobby. Expensive though (I'm on Canon) and time consuming, but such a joy. btw, is khodadad still around? Such a fountain of scripting knowledge!

Anyway, back to my problem. I was hoping to be clear enough with a "date-like" explanation - obviously I was not <blush>. I'm dealing with pdfs here. Currently, they are named like "scanned001.pdf", "scanned002.pdf" and so on. I manually assign them to categories like

date
  2015
    03
      18
type
  invoice
  announcement
  bom

sender
  shop a
  ministry of finance
  ...

If I can't achieve what I want with keywords, I'm more than happy to accomodate categories, I have no preference here. Yet. ;-)

Now, I would like to rename the files to something like "20150318_invoice_shop a.pdf", or, more generically - gosh, how do I say that

<whatever child of date><whatever 2nd child under whatever child of date><whatever 3rd child under whatever 2nd child under whatever child of date>_<respective type>_<respective sender>.<extension>
Clear now? And yes, I was on metadata templates, that I already figured out. ;-)

Best wishes

Harry

[Mario]

Your operation sounds complicated.

I would start with a variable like

{File.Categories|level:leaf;replace:~;==_}

which returns all leaf-level categories (the bottom-most categories) as a list separated with ;
The replace function replaces ; with an _

If you have a file assigned to the categories "type|invoice" and "sender|shop a" and "date|2015|03|18" the above variable returns

shop a_invoice_18

Use this as a start, e.g. in the Renamer or a MD template.

If you want to do such complicated things, study the Variables help topic  carefully, especially the section about category variables and how you can filter and control the output.

[harrylah]

Great - that helps a lot. I wasn't aware of the "|leaf".

Thanks!

Harry