Item1946: actionsearch: negation of regular expressions for web or who

Description

In many cases it's necessary to define negated expressions in ACTIONSEARCH, e.g.:

1. for the web parameter: search all webs but {Sandbox, Trash, System}
2. for the who parameter: look for all orphaned actions, i.e. the who field is "".

Negating the "=" by use of "!" doesn't seem to work here and all our efforts in searching fro how to negate a regex^{1, 2} weren't fruitful either.

We noticed that even in the plugin's documentation a rather dirty and not very failsafe hack to pick the webs of interest is used: web=[CEIMPSW].*

Using NOSEARCHALL for this task is not generally an option.

If there are ways to define the abovementioned examples, please let us know (and a hint in the documentation would be welcome). Else: regarding the web parameter one could think of a excludeweb parameter as well.

-- PhilippLeufke - 19 Aug 2009

Regarding 1.: Just noticed that this can be found in the documentation. For everyone who is interested: web="(?!Sandbox|System|Trash|TWiki).*"

But still we have no clue how to look for orphaned tasks...

-- PhilippLeufke - 24 Aug 2009

Why can't you %ACTIONSEARCH{who=""}% ?

-- CrawfordCurrie - 05 Nov 2009

Good question. I thought someone could tell me... Just tested it once more, but it just results in an empty list, although there are orphaned tasks with attribute who="" in raw code.

Does it work for you?

-- PhilippLeufke - 05 Nov 2009

It does now.

-- CrawfordCurrie - 28 Jan 2011