Bug/weirdness: Unexpected results with collection rules; ANDNOT not working, erroneous number of res

I'm trying to create a collection called History of Christianity. I'm just in the early stages of it and I don't need help building it up. But I'm confused about some unexpected intermediate results:

At an early step, my rule looked like this:

(title:church AND title:history ANDNOT mytag:biog) OR (title:christian AND title:history)

This rule finds only one book (History of the Christian Church by Philip Schaff). Very surprising, and I can't figure out why.

If I just use the first part of that, namely (title:church AND title:history ANDNOT mytag:biog), I get 11 results. So why should adding an OR clause to it eliminate most of those results? OR is generally additive.

Is this a bug, or is it some artifact of the way ANDs and ORs and ANDNOTs can or cannot be combined with parentheses? It's 3AM so it might be that I'm just not thinking clearly.

Another stab at it, factoring title:history out of the expression:

title:history AND title:(church,christian) ANDNOT mytag:biog

Again, this rule gave only one result: Studies in Early Church History by Henry Sell.

Something seems wrong, because when I use just title:history AND title:(church,christian), I get 119 results. I know that only 93 of them have "biog" in the My Tags field. The rule title:history AND title:(church,christian) AND mytag:biog showed me that. So why, when I change that AND to an ANDNOT, do I get only 1 result? By my calculations it should be 26. Am I being stupid, or is something wrong with the functioning of ANDNOT?

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Comments

Kevin Becker

This is weird. I decided to play around with your collection rule to see if I could figure out what was going on for myself. Cutting and pasting your rule produced a resulting collection of 106 resources! I have Platinum so I know I have significantly fewer resources than you do.

Here's what's in it

Christian History Mag (99 issues)
Church History (timeline)
Exploring Church History, Eckman
History of the Christian Church, Schaff
Semia 56 Social Networks in Early Christian Environment
Studies in Early Church History, Sell
Who's Who in Church History, Douglas

Rosie Perera

OK, this is very strange and definitely buggy: It was happening in a very reproducible way until I tried dragging my Biographical Resources collection to the "Minus these resources" area instead of using ANDNOT mytag:biog. When I first did that I saw something very strange indeed. Only one result was displayed (the same one that showed up when I'd used ANDNOT mytag:biog), but the grey text next to "Resulting collection" said "26 resources." Hmm... So I deleted Biographical Resources from the "Minus these resources" section, and now the whole problem described in my first post seems to have disappeared and I can't make it happen again. Twilight Zone.

I've posted my (very long) log file, in case there are some clues in it that might help the developers track this mystery down.

2388.CollectionsWeirdness.zip

Probably not very helpful, as it doesn't show how many results were found when it did stuff like this:

LibraryCatalogIndex Searching for all records matching: title:history AND title:(church,christian)

Maybe I should just chalk it up to being up too late. Maybe I'm hallucinating.

Rosie Perera

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/155352#Comment_155352

Curioser and curiouser. It's baaaaaack!

UPDATE:

(title:church AND title:history) OR (title:christian AND title:history) --> 119 resources

(title:church AND title:history) OR (title:christian AND title:history) AND mytag:biog --> 104 resources

(title:church AND title:history) OR (title:christian AND title:history) ANDNOT mytag:biog --> 36 resources

Plenty of the 36 do have the tag Biog so they shouldn't be included:

Mark Barnes

It works for me. I wonder if there's a typo and your syntax is invalid. If it keeps occurring, maybe post a screenshot?

Rosie Perera

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/155363#Comment_155363

It works for me. I wonder if there's a typo and your syntax is invalid. If it keeps occurring, maybe post a screenshot?

I just did, before you posted that. And I've copied pasted here to the forum every time, so any typo I might have had would have been readily evident.

Rosie Perera

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/155370#Comment_155370

Furthermore...

Here's a screenshot from when I removed mytag:biog from the rule and dragged my Biographical Resources collection to the "Minus these resources" area instead. Different outcome from above. 26 results:

Notice the ones with tag "Biog" are not there now. (It's all case insensitive, so it doesn't matter that they're tagged Biog and I was using mytag:biog, BTW. I've tested it and get the same results either way.)

It should be no different, because my Biographical Resources collection is defined precisely as those resources with mytag:Biog:

Rosie Perera

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/155379#Comment_155379

Here's another example of where ANDNOT is not working for me:

The Doctrine of Justification: An Outline of Its History in the Church and of Its Exposition from Scripture should not be listed in the results.

Rosie Perera

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/155383#Comment_155383

OK, I finally caught a screenshot of it reporting a different number of results than were actually showing in the list:

This came after editing the rule over and over, cutting bits of it and undoing.

Kevin Becker

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/155391#Comment_155391

It looks like this might be the same bug as over here http://community.logos.com/forums/t/20710.aspx

Graham Criddle

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/155359#Comment_155359

(title:church AND title:history) OR (title:christian AND title:history) ANDNOT mytag:biog --> 36 resources

Hi Rosie

This doesn't address all the issues you were seeing but I was playing around with this and got similarly strange results which were corrected by adding extra parentheses to force the "ANDNOT" component to be treated as separate.

(Not having tagged resources I just used the ANDNOT operator to affect whether one of my titles showed or not.

In the first case below a title with 'Early' is included even though the expression should exclude it.

In the second case I added extra parentheses around the first sets of terms and the book containing 'Early' in its title was removed.

If this is relevant then there may be some issue with operator precedence involved

Hope this helps

Graham

Mark Barnes

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/155426#Comment_155426

It looks like this might be the same bug as over here http://community.logos.com/forums/t/20710.aspx

Looking at Rosie's scrollbar, I think you're right.

Mark Barnes

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/155359#Comment_155359

(title:church AND title:history) OR (title:christian AND title:history) --> 119 resources

(title:church AND title:history) OR (title:christian AND title:history) AND mytag:biog --> 104 resources

(title:church AND title:history) OR (title:christian AND title:history) ANDNOT mytag:biog --> 36 resources

This is definitely an operator precedence issue. Your last example will be interpreted like this:

(title:church AND title:history) OR ((title:christian AND title:history) ANDNOT mytag:biog)

whereas you want this:

((title:church AND title:history) OR (title:christian AND title:history)) ANDNOT mytag:biog