Can Scrivener somehow (automatically) report when a document has a custom metadata date and that date is today?
If not. Can I create a collection with the search term “date of today” or even better “date of today and 5 days in the future”?
And if that doesn’t work either, any idea that shows me documents with certain custom metadata dates in the binder is welcome. Thank you!
Scrivener is not a reminder app, if that’s what you’re looking for.
Probably the easiest solution would be to sort by the custom metadata field.
You can also build a search collection based on the metadata field, and use all of the “date search” options from Table 11.1 in the (Mac) manual. That includes “0d” for today.
That’s exactly what I tried, but it doesn’t work. “0d” shows nothing at all.
This only works here in combination with m/cdate. Or am I misunderstanding you?
I tested “0d” with custom metadata before I wrote my response. Make sure that you actually have today’s date assigned in the metadata field, and make sure that you’re searching on the custom date field – you’ll find it on the search options dropdown menu.
What are your other search options? (Whole word, included/excluded, etc.)
Hmm. Should work. Does that document successfully show up in other searches? Like a normal text search?
Yes.
And if I enter the date directly (with unchanged settings) Scrivener finds all the documents it is supposed to find. So, this works
What I don’t understand when I read this
Why “edited within the last week”? I would search for such documents with mdate:.
I only search in this custom metadata field. I had assumed that in this case Scrivener will only find documents that are within 7 days of this date, no?
Why don’t you use the search for created date or modified date? This hidden pop-up appears when right-clicking the search icon above the Binder…
Strange, I’m not sure why this isn’t working for you either! Here is what I tried:
For this test I got two results: the two items for today, one of which has yet to occur.
The only question marks from your settings are whether all of your test documents are in the Document Templates folder or the Trash, for obvious reasons.
Well, even though other searches seem to be running as intended, it might be worth holding Option down on the File menu, and selecting the command to rebuild the search index. That’s what I would do whenever I am getting omissions that make no sense.
Thanks @AmberV. I will take a closer look at this later and rebuild the search index first. 
And thanks to you too @AntoniDol But I don’t think that’s the same thing. It’s not about finding documents that have been created or modified at some point. The date in this custom metadata field has nothing to do with it.
Indeed, if you try to use the mdate or cdate prefixes then you will get all items within the search scope that have been modified or created today. If you combined it with something specific to this custom field, like “2024 mdate:0d”, then you would get all items modified today that have this custom field set to some point within this year.
Useful, for sure, but not quite what is needed.
@AmberV, you are my star! 
That was it. Not that I would understand that. I haven’t been in a different time zone the last few hours. 
Anyway, now everything is working as expected. Thanks again, also to you @kewms
Yeah that shouldn’t make a difference unless you are travelling, and then all of the times would shift to stay fixed to where they were made from, and potentially days, if the time is set around midnight (or I guess if you travel to Australia). Well I will put it on the list to make sure there is nothing weird about that. Do you have some example times that were not working so I can test?
Mm, I’ve tried so many things and deleted everything again. But it was actually already late, around midnight.
I don’t know if it’s just me, but this function really helps me. I copy a newspaper article into Scrivener, but don’t have time to read it now. So I simply set a date in the future and a collection that can be called up reminds me of this article. Of course you can do it differently, but I like to do it this way.
Of course, it would be even better if Scrivener would automatically tell me that this date is today. But as @kewms said in a stern tone
I’ll keep that in mind. 
Yeah it’s actually a really cool idea, you can “snooze” things you want to work on, but don’t have the time to, by giving them tomorrow’s date or whatever, then clear the date once it is addressed or read. It’s not a powerhouse for this kind of stuff (like a dedicated journaling/reminder tool), but for material you’ve already got in Scrivener it’s not bad.
Myself I’d probably stick with what I already use for this kind of thing, Logseq, and make use of external Scrivener links so I can click to load binder items from it when they come up. It can do much more advanced queries, even build tables based on them, etc.
And the collection does not get bigger and bigger because it only records documents in a certain period of time in the future. New documents are recorded, others are removed without me doing anything, even if I haven’t read them. I don’t even notice it and don’t feel guilty.
I know it’s been a while, but this is a method I use.
This method also allows me to drop the list into the project/doc bookmarks OR after I read /analyze the original, I can drag-drop the link where it needs to be.
Good ideas never come too late and yours is one of them. I’ll have to try it out at my leisure. Thank you
