Fun with Search Constraints

System

I am trying to put a search query together that will, in a nutshell, find all the expired files that are not in 2 specific file paths. Should be easy with the wizzbang set of constraints that IW provides to accomplish such an easy task, but this is Interwoven after all, so it will not be easy.

Here are the basic requirements. We have an existing search query (built with the Java CSSDK) that determine if a file is expired based on its 'Expired Date" metadata. This works fine. Due to some new functionality, I now need to make sure the expiration process does not expire any files in these relative paths:

this/relative/path*
this/other/relative/path*

Keep in mind there are about a dozen other folders within the root "this" folder where we do want to expire files. I designed the query as this:



[HTML]




[/HTML]

What this ultimately does is expire everything in all relative paths EXCEPT "this*". Rather than only exclude the two specific paths I indicated, it is excluding all paths that begin with "this". Not exactly what I expected.

I suspect the NOT constraint may not work the way I expect it would with a path. I have opened a support case for this, but so far crickets.

By the way, the query turned into this search predicate, which appears correct to me:

[HTML]templatedata/service/schedule*templatedata/contest/contest_entry*[/HTML]

Has anyone used search constraints heavily and understand how I can accomplish what I want?