Extracting part of the name into aliases

DEVONthink Automation
1

Dear all

I am just wondering of there is any script that can perform a batch job of extracting part of the name of each document within a group into the document’s aliases field. The purpose is to use the wikilink function of the DTPO and link all of my notes that are referenced to a certain document.

The rule of extraction is straight forward: I prefix the first 5 characters of all of my documents as unique identifiers. Therefore I just need to extract the first 5 characters of the name and put it into the aliases field.

Thanks all of you in advance
George

2

What have you tried so far?

3

Hi Jim

Just copying codes here and there. I think it got the job done “if” the kind of files are all pdf. Two issues:
(1) “if theSelection is {} then error “Select an item, please”” doesn’t seem to work, the script will run even I haven’t select anything in the group.
(2) I am not sure about the syntax to test for pdf or rtf (annotations) because the aliases I assign should/will be different. something like:

if the kind of theSelection is pdf then

– code for pdf, aliase = first 5 characters
else

– code for not pdf, aliase = first 5 characters & “-A”

end if

Please advise

tell application id "com.devon-technologies.thinkpro2"
	set theSelection to the selection
	if theSelection is {} then error "Select an item, please"
	repeat with theRecord in theSelection
		try
			
			set longName to the name of theRecord
			set shortName to texts 1 thru 6 of longName
			set shortName to (do shell script "echo \"" & shortName & "\" | xargs")
			set theAliases to aliases of theRecord as string
			
			if theAliases is "" then
				set theAliases to shortName
				set aliases of theRecord to shortName
			else
				set theAliases to shortName & "," & theAliases
				set aliases of theRecord to theAliases
			end if
			
		end try
	end repeat
	display alert "batch processing completed" giving up after 1
end tell
4

I got most part working now, except for no selection error. Now I just need to run the same script on two smart groups, one being pdfs only and the other one being annotations only .

Thanks again.

tell application id "com.devon-technologies.thinkpro2"
	set theSelection to the selection
	-- display alert (count theSelection) giving up after 1
	if theSelection is {} then error "Select an item, please"
	repeat with theRecord in theSelection
		try
			
			set longName to the name of theRecord
			set shortName to texts 1 thru 6 of longName
			set shortName to (do shell script "echo \"" & shortName & "\" | xargs")
			set theAliases to aliases of theRecord as string
			
			if type of theRecord is not PDF document then
				set shortName to shortName & ".A"
			end if
			
			
			if theAliases is "" then
				set theAliases to shortName
			else
				set theAliases to shortName & "," & theAliases
			end if
			set aliases of theRecord to theAliases
		end try
	end repeat
	display alert "batch processing completed" giving up after 1
end tell