This is slightly specialized, but hopefully not too much. Perhaps it will at least be useful as a starting point for someone.
The task to be solved
Having identified one or more records (PDFs or annotations exported from PDFs) as useful for my current research task, I wish to retrieve all of the records associated with the relevant document(s). So, having found an annotation from paper 1 and paper 2, I now wish to gather the PDFs for both papers and all annotations related to them.
Background
I have a database called “PDFs” (which indexes another folder, but I don’t think that matters). It contains the PDFs I use for my research, annotations I’ve exported from Skim in multimarkdown, and the .skim files that Skim automatically creates (which contain all the annotations in a file).
The naming scheme is along the lines of author-year-ID-etc., where ID is a unique number I’ve assigned the document.
- Jones-2011-15.pdf
- Jones-2011-15.skim
- Jones-2011-15-3 Canonical reference for social capital.md
- Jones-2011-15-3 Definition of social capital.md
- Jones-2011-15-5 Applications of social capital.md
The last three items are exported annotations, including the page on which they appear and a “headline” that summarizes their import.
I’ll refer to Jones-2011-15 as the “searchName”.
The code
This qualifies as “ugly, but workable”. Suggestions for improvement welcome.
--
-- Retrieve into a folder all items sharing the same name as the selected items in the PDF database.
-- So, you can start with the pdf, md notes or skim notes and get everything.
--
-- Created by: Glenn Hoetker
-- Created on: 12/01/13 14:58:22
--
-- Use at your own risk. I accept no responsibility for damage that may be done.
--
-- Copyright (c) 2013 Arizona State University
-- All Rights Reserved
--
set retrievedRecords to {}
try
set dialogResult to display dialog ¬
"What should the new group be called?" buttons {"Cancel", "OK"} ¬
default button "OK" cancel button ¬
"Cancel" default answer ("New Group")
on error number -128
display dialog "User cancelled."
return
end try
set newGroupName to text returned of dialogResult
-- Extract searchName (Jones-2011-15) from the selected records, whether the selected record is a
-- PDF, .skim, or Markdown file.
tell application "DEVONthink Pro"
set theRecords to the selection
repeat with eachRecord in theRecords
set recordName to the name of eachRecord
set saveTID to AppleScript's text item delimiters
set AppleScript's text item delimiters to {"-"}
set searchName to words 1 through 3 of recordName as text
set AppleScript's text item delimiters to saveTID
set retrievedRecords to retrievedRecords & (search searchName in current database)
end repeat
-- Create a new folder at the root of the PDFs database and replicate the relevant records to it
set theGroup to create location newGroupName in "PDFs"
repeat with eachRecord in retrievedRecords
if parent of eachRecord is not "Trash" then replicate record eachRecord to theGroup
end repeat
end tell
I played with smart groups and new windows, etc., but ultimately decided that a new static group with replicants of the retrieved records worked best. Once they are all in there, I can go through them, toss out any that aren’t relevant, manually add new items, etc.
Obviously, this depends on a regular record naming scheme. Perhaps it will be useful to someone.
)
