I didn’t know whether to tag this message as a tip or as an issue, so I tagged it as both.
I was trying to do an Advanced Search for all the people not born in 1923. So I created a criterion of Birth > date > not equal to > 1923, and it doesn’t work. There’s nothing magic about 1923. It doesn’t work for any year.
Well, it does work if the birth date is exactly 1923, but not if it’s about 1923 or if it’s 17 Jul 1923. I suspect this is working as designed and that it’s a feature rather than a bug, but it’s annoying.
I can get the effect I want by specifying Birth > date > before > 1/1/1923 OR Birth > date > after > 12/31/1923,
RM7 worked exactly the same way, so this is not a new behavior in RM8/9/10.
I’m aware that this sort of search is fraught in any case because of people without birth dates or with text birth dates or with birth date ranges or with approximate birth date or with multiple birth facts. But in my particular use case, none of those complicating conditions applied.
I’m wondering why does not contain isn’t the right approach for what you describe. notequal is pretty explicitly supposed to exclude anything that is not exactly and only 1923.
yeah that interesting “1923” (or any year I suppose does not work) I had not noticed this before but now I need to correct one of my scripts for that “issue” example
Yep. does not contain works just fine for my use case. Much thanks. I don’t know why I didn’t think of it.
I use contain and does not contain all the time for text fields. But it didn’t occur to me to use does not contain for a date field.
By the way, there is a “rest of the story”. Looking for people not born in a certain year surely sounds very strange. Why would you do such a search? What I was actually looking for was all descendants of one of my great grandmothers who were born in 1923. That’s a difficult search to set up in RM because it’s tricky to combine the descendants rule with other rules. There does not seem to be a good way to set up a search for descendants of and combine it with other rules.That’s because you have to select and then unselect. You cannot really use straightforward Boolean logic with an AND if one of your rules is descendants of. So your search is to select the descendants of and then to unselect based on birth date. So I had to unselect based on not born in 1923. When that combined search did not work, I then began investigating why the not born in 1923 part of the search rule did not work. And now here we are, with a good solution that I didn’t think of. Namely, use does not contain rather than is not equal.
