I am in the process of converting my “life” to a GTD managed system. I’m waiting for OmniFocus…but currently playing with iGTD. I keep EVERYTHING in DTPO. I’ve been using ScanSnap to convert all my paper documents to searchable PDF’s for quite some time. I have a huge database. I originally had multiple smaller DB’s, but got tired of switching back and forth, and not being able to search from one interface through all of my “stuff.”
The point being, all of my project and other files for my developing GTD system are in DTPO. Using iGTD or OmniFocus, I regularly need to link tasks to certain files in these project folders being held in DTPO. Is there a way to do this? If not, with the upcoming 2.0 that is searchable in Spotlight, will linking to DTPO files from outside DTPO be possible?
It’s not currently possible to link from outside to files created or imported in DT Pro. It will be possible to do that in the future version 2.0.
If you exported all of your database contents to a specified folder, then created a new database and captured the contents of that folder into the new database using File > Index, the external files would be stored in a folder in the Finder, and other applications could link to those files.
The problem with that approach is two-fold: you can’t edit the indexed files directly in your database, and any new text files you were to create in the database would not be visible to an external application.
A workaround, if you can get used to it, would be to do all document editing and creation of new text files with an external editor such as TextEdit, save the files as RTF or RTFD to the folder containing your other material, and index the new content into your database (Indexing could be semi-automatic if the entire folder were Index-captured; new and modified content would become visible in your database when you select the corresponding group and choose File > Synchronize). Any new content you create or bring into your DT Pro database would have to be exported to that Finder folder if it needs to be visible to and linked from an external application. Note that your GDT files would also be visible to Spotlight.
Another alternative: As I recall, there’s a template DT Pro GDT database in the samples on the DEVONacademy pages. I don’t use GTD, so can’t comment on it from experience.
This is a reply to an old post, but I was wondering if the new Spotlight integration (and the stub files that are created by DTP to enable the Spotlight search) makes this possible now? Thanks.
Doug, as far as I know the metadata files created for Spotlight integration don’t provide hooks for linkage to database contents by other applications. But Christian knows a lot more about that than I do.
What I had in mind in my earlier post in this thread is that all database documents will be stored as Finder files (although probably “encased” inside a package file), which isn’t currently the case for text, HTML and WebArchive files. Currently a rich text note is part of the monolithic database “soup” and can’t be distinguished as a discrete file by an outside application.
Bill, I was just thinking that if you could create a link to the Spotlight stub file (or whatever that’s called), it would, in fact, open the item in the DT database. This seems like a good stopgap measure until 2.0 sees the light of day.
Not to bring in the competition, but Yojimbo creates these odd URLs that open items in the program (e.g., x-yojimbo-item://445F4E52-04CC-40C0-88DA-FF63AB515232). Not sure if that references its Spotlight stub files or not.
BTW, have you actually SEEN a build of 2.0 (and I realize you may not be able to answer that ?
Please do not consider anything in a Caches folder to be something you can link to. The data in there can change at any time in any fashion whatsoever. I hope that makes it clear that this is a cache i.e. non-stable data.
In a next major release we will support specific public URLs that point to a record in a database.
