Jon Udell

I’ve been noodling around with search folders in Vista. The one that shows up by default in the shell’s Favorite Links panel, entitled Recently Changed, is of particular interest. Just like the Recent Changes page in a wiki, it’s a nice way to monitor activity in a dynamic system that’s always accreting new stuff.

Good news: The Recently Changed folder is governed by an XML file, in the Searches subdirectory of the home directory, called Recently Changed.search-ms:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<persistedQuery version="1.0">

<viewInfo viewMode="details" iconSize="16">
  <sortList>
    <sort viewField="System.DateModified" direction="descending"/>
  </sortList>
</viewInfo>

<query>
  <conditions>
    <condition type="leafCondition" valuetype="System.StructuredQueryType.DateTime"
    property="System.DateModified" operator="imp"
    value="R00UUUUUUUUZZXD-30NU" propertyType="wstr" />
  </conditions>

<kindList>
  <kind name="document"/>
  <kind name="picture"/>
  <kind name="music"/>
  <kind name="movie"/>
  <kind name="video"/>
  <kind name="note"/>
  <kind name="journal"/>
  <kind name="email"/>
</kindList>

<subQueries>
  <subQuery knownSearch="{4f800859-0bd6-4e63-bbdc-38d3b616ca48}"/>
</subQueries>

</query>
</persistedQuery>

Bad news: I can’t figure out to write my own queries. value="R00UUUUUUUUZZXD-30NU"? What’s up with that? I guess this relates in some way to the advanced query syntax for Windows desktop search. But I can’t find any examples that look like this:

<conditions>
  <condition type="leafCondition" valuetype="System.StructuredQueryType.DateTime"
  property="System.DateModified" operator="gt" value="date:yesterday" />
</conditions>

There must be documentation for this somewhere, but at the moment there are very few hits in any of the search engines for the query: vista persistedquery. That’s a shame. I know that advanced search doesn’t appeal to the masses, but sure does appeal to me.