viewing Parents only, no Children, in agenda

Question

I would like to use agenda to generate a list of currently active projects. An active project (for me) is an entry tagged with wip and is not a TODO entry. I would like the list to have only the top-most entry, ignoring all children. Thus, once the search has hit a match, it can skip searching all children.

I am having difficulty because because tags are inherited by children, and therefore, children show up in my search --- how do I prevent this? For example, doing a match in agenda using wip+TODO="" strips out the TODO items (that's good) but parents and all children inheriting the wip tag show up.

Note: the top-most entry is not necessarily at LEVEL 1 or 2. The top-most entry with a wip tag could be deeper in the outline structure. I am using agenda because I need to search across several org files; otherwise, within a single org file, I would just create a sparse-tree.

Answer 1

I think I arrived at a solution. It seems to work from initial testing.

(setq org-tags-match-list-sublevels nil)

Then do M-x org-tags-view and use search string wip+TODO=""

I found the key insight from @lawlist who responded to a different question here.

I will probably write a function to do this so that I change the value of org-tags-match-list-sublevels only when I need to execute this specific search.