Forum Archive

The new "Search in Dropbox" feature, in 1.1's file browser, is amazing. I've pretty much stopped browsing for files now, and just always use search.

After some experimenting, I believe the following are true:

• It searches the currently viewed folder, and all sub-folders
• So if you are at the top level, it searches your whole Dropbox account
• What it searches
• It searches both file names and file content
• It doesn't search folder names
• Showing results
• It shows the filename matches first, and then file content matches
• When you load a file from the Search view, it pre-populates the Search field for the file, and jumps to the first match - which is really useful
• It always does fuzzy matching (so searching for Cohn also matches Coaching)
• This does make it a bit hard to search for short words, if you may have a lot of matches to search through

I'd really like to understand more about how it works behind the scenes, to make sure I don't accidentally miss hits.

• Does it search the content of all Dropbox files, or only those I have previously viewed/downloaded in Editorial?
• What's the network usage like - when I'm searching through the entire Dropbox folder, is it downloading all content?

Thanks

Clare

Your observations are correct. Regarding network usage: Searching never downloads anything, it only searches the files that are already synced to your device.

Thanks very much for the swift reply.

I'm really glad I asked. That does make sense.

So I presume this means that:

• For folders I've previously visited, but not recently, Editorial's Search will see out-of-date content
• For folders I've never visited in Editorial, Editorial's Search will never match any content

I have 293 folders in Dropbox (nested to various levels)!

Is there any way to get Editorial to sync every .md file in all those directories, regardless of whether they've already been synced - e.g. via Workflow, rather than having to visit them all manually, please? Do Workflows also only see already-synced content?

(I searched Editorial Workflows for download, sync and force)

I think this syncing is probably better as a separate thread, so please ignore the question above, and see How to force Editorial to sync every .md file in Dropbox instead.

+1 for some easier way to get sync'ing. Such as "sync this folder's contents on demand".

For folders I've previously visited, but not recently, Editorial's Search will see out-of-date content

No, once you visit a folder, it gets synced automatically in the future.

For folders I've never visited in Editorial, Editorial's Search will never match any content

Yes.