How to move/export documents to DEVONthink

you can with the ideas above make the Mac to work when you turn it on after returning from the trip.

I see. It is now clear to me that without a Mac there will be no update of the database. As I “only” own an iMac I will not be able to get documents from my Synology when being for a week or so on business trip.
Well, I could setup a workflow where my NAS sends every web scraped document via email - which I then could somehow import with DTTG on my iPad. But this is a bit cumbersome.

But it would be sufficient, if these “import requests” are processed by DEVONthink or DTTG when I open them …

They do if they have access to an active and reachable sync location.

Why do you need the Mac to be updated while you’re away? Do you have an assistant, colleague, or significant other accessing the Mac?

Actually I have three devices playing a role in that game:

  1. Syno NAS, checking the Internet every 15 - and producing a pdf / HTML document if something is interesting to me. Synology also hosts WEBDav.
  2. iMac: which I use when at home.
  3. iPad: which I use when on business trip (no assistant, by the way).

What I want to achieve: whenever I open iMac OR iPad, I would like to see in my inbox the documents which have been put together by my NAS.

Isn’t that what “connect with server” in the finder and the files app on the iPad are for? Map your “inbox” to the relevant folder on the NAS and that’s it.
Basically, you treat your NAS as a sink for files. If you want to work with them (as opposed to just store them), an application has to access them. That’s either your iPad or your Mac or both. This app has to run, it has to have access to the NAS. There will be no instantaneous appearance of documents in DT, unless you keep your Mac running all the time and processing the files from the NAS.

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Yes, I think that might be the solution. I just checked the property settings of the database as well as the DT settings … Where and how can I change this mapping?
cgrunenberg already mentioned that “the path of the inbox folder is ~/Library/Application Support/DEVONthink 3/Inbox”

You can’t map it as the term is used in Windows.
I believe @chrillek was suggesting indexing the folder on the NAS. This is covered in DEVONthink’s Help > Documentation > In & Out > Importing & Indexing. Make sure to read the entire section to be aware of the integration with the file system.

… yep. If this works also for DTTG then I have the solution I was looking for. I will try …

Perhaps I’m missing something in the thread… But DEVONthink to Go does not/cannot process files indexed into folders into a database on macOS. Only when DEVONthink macOS updates the index, then syncs the folders, will any additions/changes be available for sync to DEVONthink to Go.

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I meant to mount the folder via WebDAV, SMB, AFS on the Mac an then process/import the files into DT. Of course, indexing is also possible. In any case, there’s no direct way from the NAS into the DT database

If I am at home, there is no problem at all - because I can switch on my Mac and import the files from my NAS using a keyboard Maestro routine.

I followed the recommendation of rmschne when being abroad with my iPad only: open the file app, activate the link to my server and import the files to DTTG with some iOS shortcut (still to be done). This will work!!

So thank you all very much for your thoughts in this matter :slight_smile:

I didn’t know that it would work on the DEVONthink ToGo app (and I would have simply kept the iMac on), but as they say on Michael Feldman’s radio show, “Whad’Ya Know?”

Enjoy.

If you are using a Synology, hopefully you are also using Synology Drive. You could have the job on the Syno drop the PDFs into a folder in Synology Drive, then have a job on your Mac move them to the global inbox. I use Hazel on my Mac to move things around like that, but there are a number of ways to do it.

Be careful with Synology Driver, it use to fail silently with incompatible file names. I stopped using it because if a file fails to be synchronized by that cause, you don’t receive any warning or can look in any place to check why that file is not being synchronized.

I it a very annoying bug that they even had refuse to acknowledge. Not not synching the file, but telling you what files are being synced and why.

BTW, the Synology Drive has a very restricted subset of valid characters and file name length.

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I know that there is an issue with the filenames using Synology Drive - therefore this is not a real solution for me. On top of that: I am not always at home so that the “first sync via Mac” is not option for me. I rather investigate on initiating the sync from my iOS device with DTTG - because most of the time I have my iPhone in my pocket …

BTW, the Synology Drive has a very restricted subset of valid characters and file name length.

And again, more support for our advocacy of not using punctuation other than: hyphens, underscores, spaces, and periods and not using emoji in file or database names.
:slight_smile:

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An opportunity to add an script to sanitize selected file names. :grin:

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You volunteering? The starter could be the info on a StackOverflow thread from 8 years ago using Regular Expressions https://stackoverflow.com/questions/11794144/regular-expression-for-valid-filename from 2012

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Ha ha, not so easy. That expression limits, but not converts and transforms any character wanted as non valid for one of the replacements. I tried some time ago but Apple script plus Regex are completely alien to me.

Converting seems to be a bit too much. Unicode has thousands of codepoints (think Mandarin traditional and simplified versions), it would not be feasible to map them do the meagre selection of less then 128 characters suggested here. Much less to that in a regular expression. Just remove them.