Subdocuments?

I’m in trial version of EagleFiler. So far it’s impressive BUT it appears I can’t create subdocuments - there’s one level only for a folder. This is a vital feature for me. It puzzles me that a program that is otherwise so impressive does not allow subdocuments, and I am wondering if in my newbieness I have missed something?

You can certainly create nested folders in EagleFiler. If you select a folder in the source list and choose File > New Folder it will create a subfolder. You can also drag and drop to put one folder inside another.

Nested folders

Thanks for prompt reply, Michael. Nested folders are not a substitute for subdocuments because a folder itself can’t contain text, only files. What I need are actual subdocuments. A tree structure of hierarchical documents, kind of like an outline with many levels except these are entire documents.

Because otherwise EagleFiler is obviously a fine program, and support is obviously great, I regret I’ll have to look further for a solution to my particular needs. I’ll come back to EagleFiler for projects where I don’t need subdocuments. How about adding this to your feature request list? Take a look at Scrivener, which does allow for subdocuments. For various reasons I don’t care for Scrivener, but it does do subdocuments.

Thanks for clarifying. I don’t think subdocuments really make sense for an application like EagleFiler where records correspond to actual files on disk. In the filesystem and other applications, only folders can contain files. So even if EagleFiler worked around this somehow, there’d always be a mismatch when accessing your library via other applications.

Ooops!

So I missed something after all! None of the documents in EagleFiler are stored internally, they are referenced from external disk locations? How did I miss that? Sigh. So of course, you’re right, it wouldn’t make sense to try to add this.

Right. The database only contains metadata. The content is stored as files in the library folder that you chose.

Try Scrivener. Its “Folders” can also contain text.

Scrivener

Thanks for the suggestion, Steve. I do have Scrivener, and I like the nested folders, but text within the folders is one level only, near as I can tell you can’t create subdocuments. What I need are nested documents/text files, not folders. Hard to find. Must be hard to program. MyInfo for Windows does have them, and the developer says he can’t do the program for Mac because the hierarchical text files depend on Windows technologies somehow. He didn’t explain further than that. The closest I have come to what I want is EverNote for the similarity of display to MyInfo, but again, it has nested Notebooks (their equivalent of folders) but not documents.

Steve. I do have Scrivener, and I like the nested folders, but text within the folders is one level only, near as I can tell you can’t create subdocuments.

That’s not so. You can nest documents to at least four levels (that’s where I stopped trying). I was mistaken in saying that you can nest only within folders.

Based on your experience, I installed Scrivener on my PC and LO! - no problem at all nesting documents. This is a big AHA!, Steve. Thanks!

I am now wondering if the problem with my Scrivener on Mac is Lion OS, which I am running on a Mac Mini. From various sources I know some software doesn’t work right with Lion. I’ll go to a Scrivener forum and see what I can find out. Since I’m now off topic for this forum, I won’t post further here. Thanks to everyone!