Searching for empty values

The advanced/saved searches are one of the most useful things in Zotero but without finding the correct (i.e. up-to-date) forum thread they are often not doing what a user would expect :( AFAICT this is most often related to funky handling of empty values.
The most extreme case I have encountered yet is the one with dates (cf. https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/69234/save-a-search-no-date) because any workarounds using "contains" do not work because that option is not available for time/date fields such as "accessed".

Is there any technical reason to not simply include an "is empty"/"is not empty" entry in the search dialog (w/o a text entry or an disabled one) for all fields? I'd assume it's a simple "IS NULL" check in the SQL, no?
  • Agreed. The search for ‘Tag’ ‘does not contain’ ‘’ (leave the last box blank) is not a bad solution, but it isn't as inuitive as an explicit entry ('is empty' / 'is not empty'). Furthermore, leaving the last box blank isn't working for me. Nor does the previous solution (searching for %).
  • Yep. I would really love this feature. I manage a shared group folder with graduate students and my minimum requirement is that they make sure the metadata at least contain an author and a date... It would be nice to have an advanced search capability for missing dates (even a complicated workaround would be fine for me... I'm willing to put in a little effort for this!)
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