I am trying to create an iPhone Shortcut which uses the share sheet to save a bookmark to a specific DT3/DTTG group. The group would be the same each time so presumably its name or UUID it would be part of the shortcut.
I am not sure how to specify the Group. There is no way for me to define a name or UUID. Rather selecting the word Group while editing the shortcut brings up a search box. Presumably that is intended to search within DTTG for the desired destination group. But any search I do always comes up blank.
Thoughts?
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Sure there is. It’s the Get Item DEVONthink To Go action.
PS: I wouldn’t choose Any in the input.
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That works - thank you
What are the 6 types of input you recommend other than Safari web pages?
It wasn’t very intentional actually.
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How would you specify where you wanted to go?
For example hey Siri bookmark Health or hey Siri bookmark finance to have it go to the respective locations.
How would you link the variable health to a specific folder in DEVONthink?
You could only talk to Siri in this manner if you had separate shortcuts, e.g, one for Open Health.
How would you link the variable health to a specific folder in DEVONthink?
You long-press the location in DEVONthink To Go, and choose Copy Item Link. That’s what you paste into the Get Item action. That would be followed by an Open Item action.
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Have you considered or would you consider the equivalent of DT3’s Group Selector for DTTG?
Presently if I am on iOS and want to add a document to a Group for a specific client I can only upload it to preset folders and later sort that out by moving the document on DT3. It would be nice to be able to add immediately to any arbitrary Devonthink Group, as can be done with DT3.
Have you considered or would you consider the equivalent of DT3’s Group Selector for DTTG?
Are you referring to within DEVONthink To Go?
PS: We consider many things but lacking infinite time and resources, some are pursued and others aren’t.
Yes that’s what I meant.
Am I correct that there is no way I can script/shortcut this on my own at present on iOS?
You originally wanted to create a bookmark to a specific group. I provided a solution to that.
If you want actual arbitrary choices, you could tell the shortcut to use Ask Each Time…
OK so there is a Group selector (!) albeit it works fairly slowly so perhaps it is best to just add to a designated group and move from there.
But if I try to share a bookmark or a PDF file I get an error saying it failed to communicate with DTTG. What am I doing wrong?
https://www.icloud.com/shortcuts/ec077619cc0f442e81c64696b25aee98
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Remove the Create Action.
Does the shortcut fail?
And have you looked at this…
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The Quick Launch shortcut is helpful - thanks.
Re: the Create DT Item shortcut, it does not fail if I remove the create step. But it does take a surprisingly long time to run - over a minute for sure. Whereas if I simply click the item link from elsewhere it immediately opens DTTG to the desired location.
And the Group I am referencing in my Item Link is very small in content. Why does it take so long for the “Get Item” step to run?
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Are you referring to your shortcut?
I can’t speak to the technical mechanism here. That would be @eboehnisch’s territory. However, how many items do you have in DEVONthink To Go? You’ll see it under the ? on the databases screen.
My main database I was trying it on has 147,106 items in 435 Gb.
But I just tried it instead on my Global Inbox which has only 8,206 items in 1.6 Gb and it is still extraordinarily slow to load the “Get Item” step in the shortcut.
In every other respect performance of DTTG is terrific - even on my huge 435 Gb database I can search and view items and resolve item links immediately. Performance only fails with Shortcuts.
Does my sample Create DT3 Item shortcut work for you?
Yes, though I only have 4438 items in DEVONthink To Go at this time. Should that make a difference? Perhaps, perhaps not. As I said, I don’t know how the underlying mechanism works. However, parsing a specific UUID out of a dataset of 147,000+ items would logically take longer than 4,400. A minute or more? Could be it’s just using a lot of memory locating the item.
Is it still slow after rebooting?
It is still slow after rebooting
When I try to run the shortcut I occasionally get this error as well:
I realize I may well be pushing the limits of DTT3. But it works really well other than this issue of creating items via Share. And there is a good workaround for that; Dropbox works really well on iOS to share from anywhere. I can create an indexed Dropbox folder in DT3/DTTG and share there; from there I can very quickly use DTTG to move to another group if desired. So it’s not a problem.
I may get back to you though after I give a try to the “real” driving reason that motivated me to re-explore DTTG - I understand it works on Apple Vision Pro. I have read a few reviews lately suggetsing it is indeed useful for “real” work as a portable set of external monitors for a Macbook. So I may get back to you on how well DTTG works in AVP
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That message should be unrelated to the shortcut.
So I may get back to you on how well DTTG works in AVP
We would be interested to hear frmo a practical standpoint.
Actually, getting a single item using the item link/UUID should be quite fast as it’s an indexed lookup. However, the Shortcuts extension directly accesses the data store and this can sometimes be blocked when another instance is also accessing the same store, e.g., DEVONthink itself, the file provider extension, etc.
How slow is it for you? A second or, like, 30 seconds?
If I click on an item link from an external app such as Notes or Messages it responds almost immediately. But It takes about a minute for Shortcuts to run the “Get Item” command.
Within DTTG I can search for an individual group or document with almost instant results. But if I use shortcuts and want to select a destination Group, it takes about a minute for the list of groups to appear.