Trying to understand Filter Boolean Syntax... Seems broken.

[#1]

Hi All! I'm a new hubspot user, and am trying to do some batch editing. 

EDIT: this is specific to contact filters in the free version of Hubspot CRM. 

In this case, I'm trying to build some pretty straight-forward boolean operators to do so... 

In one case i'm trying ot go through job titles and automatically populate a new field as follows.  .  . 

Filter: 

Job title- Contains Exactly:

(engineer AND Manager) OR (engineer AND VP) OR (engineer AND Director) 

This exact string does not work as it should. Are there any special syntax rules for Boolean that anyone knows of? 

I realize that the paid marketing product seems to have lists with an advanced search, which is very similar to the feature I would have used in ACT, the database I just migrated from. 

[#2]

Hi, @Sallen1. This can be difficult to parse without a screen shot. 

To confirm, is one of your criteria "Job Title CONTAINS '(engineer AND manager)'"? Or is it Job Title CONTAINS 'engineer' AND Job Title CONTAINS 'manager'? 

If the former, it's looking for a literal string in the title for '(engineer AND manager)'. If the latter, then it should be looking for titles which contain both terms. 

[#3]

Short answer: the Latter  

So here's the use case- 

I need to categorize all of the engineering leadership in my database as such. 

Titles could include manager of engineering, engineering manager, VP engineering, Lead Engineer,  Principle Engineer, etc. etc. etc. 

There are quite a few cases in which I need to do this. 

Becuase the process of batch editing is a series of clicks, it would be really tedious to do this for every single case. 

I note that (Engineer AND Manager) gets me everything I need for that case. When i put OR after, and add (Engineer AND Director), it somehow removes the engineering manager results and ignores that boolean opeartor. It's like it overwrites each case rather than taking the input of OR. 

[#4]

How are you attempting to populate the boolean? As a calculated property, or with a workflow? Are there any properties with duplicated Title labels? It's possible you might have two properties with a label of "Title", but when you mouse over them, the property value reads differently, impacting your calculations. 

Based on what you're describing, creating a workflow to set the boolean should work if you set it up as from the screen shot below, explicitly typing out the same condition twice. I realize that's not great, but that's the syntax the list builder is looking for. 

Again, this is tough to diagnose at face value, without a screen shot. If you've got your setup with all your conditions set up as below, it should work (and I'd recommend reaching out to HubSpot Support for next steps).

[#5]

(BTW thanks for such quick responses)  

I realize I wasn't clear in the beginning. This is assuming I'm using contact filters exclusively. I'm on a free version of the CRM with a very narrow use case... I'm attempting to understand if this is possible without upgrading on the paid marketing platform, (which would not be cost-effective for me compared to something like exporting my data and cleaning it/processing it in other ways) 

[#6]

So you're describing criteria used in a contacts dash filter? To confirm, you won't be able to set a default value programmatically, nor would you be able to use a calculated property, as those can only return number values.

If this is contacts dash criteria, the logic you're providing should work. If you're using a duplicate property with an identical label, that could explain what you're seeing. Can you confirm all title properties in that filter have the exact same value? It should point to an identical property URL when you mouse over the properties in the filter.

[#7]

To answer your question about overlapping titles, I don't *think that's an issue at play. I'm working with a property called "Actual Job title" which is a direct import from my old Database. I know Job Title is a Hubspot feature property... I wasn't able to see any url mousing over or upon inspecting the element. Regardless, If the other field were being referenced by the search, it still wouldn't be returning the behavior it does, becuase "job title" is either empty, or contains something completely different from any results I receive. 

I've attached two example screenshots. 

What I'm trying to ascertain is whether I'm missing something in the boolean syntax below, or if this is a broken feature (or just not a feature at all. I can find no documentation on it) .  Assume that in my database there are multiple matches for each criteria. If I recall my booleans correctly, each should yield the expected result but neither do.  In the case of Devops AND (VP OR Director OR Manager), it simply ignores the criteria in parentheses. In the case of (devops AND Manager) OR (devops AND VP) OR (devops AND Director), each operator in parentheses cancels the preceding one out. 

To be even more specific- When I type (devops AND Manager),  it populates live results. When I add to it, to have (devops AND Manager) OR (devops AND VP), the manager results go away and it gives me results for (devops AND VP), and further (devops AND Manager) OR (devops AND VP) OR (devops AND Director) gives me only results for (devops AND Director)

[#8]

Thanks for those screen shots. I don't usually use the dash for filters, so I'm likely out of my league here. I attempted to reproduce this in the Marketing product, and wasn't able multiple filters for the same property. 

I experienced something similar to what you saw originally. I tried a filter of "Job title contains 'Engineering' ", and it returned one contact in our portal. I wasn't able to add conditionals to this, and when I attempted to augment the property with a wildcard, changing "contains 'Engineering'" to "contains 'Engineering OR'", the one result disappeared. 

It sounds like trying to force a wildcard into the text filter itself treats it like a literal. There may be smartererer folks than myself around who have a nifty way of solving for this. It's a bust for me, too. 

[#9]

I appreciate the effort! Since my data isn't crazy unwieldy, I'll probably end up exporting the field with unique identifiers and working on it in Airtable or something. 

[#10]

Good that you have something to fall back on. I've relied on that kind of fix a bunch of times, HubSpot or otherwise. 

Another option, not terribly satisfying, is to use one filter at a time, since that does return a subset of desired results, then make edits there. Not great, and may not be useful given the complexity of your filter, but it's a fallback.