Hey everyone, I’ve been painstakingly searching the these forums and trying to adjust some of the scripts posted to here to solve my problem. I have thousands of emails I’ve converted to PDF files in the file format NAME YYYYMMDD. I’m trying to match the creation date in DT to that of the date in the filename. I’ve found a few scripts, but they all seem to have the date at the beginning of the file name or the date format is YYYY-MM-DD and I can’t seem to figure out how to modify them to fit my use case. Anyone here in forums that could walk me through how (I’m trying to learn to fish) to modify one of the existing scripts? TIA!
If you post an existing script, we can advise on the modification
I’ve found these two;
1.) This first one I couldn’t get to work without modifying the filename to match the YYYY-MM-DD NAME format.
This script takes the date in the filename prefixed in the format YYYY-MM-DD and makes the creation date shown in DT as the same
tell application “DEVONthink Pro”
set selectedItems to selectionset the_date to current date
repeat with selectedItem in selectedItems
set the_name to name of selectedItem
set the_year to characters 1 thru 4 of the_name
set the_month to characters 6 thru 7 of the_name
set the_day to characters 9 thru 10 of the_name
set the year of the_date to the_year as string
set the month of the_date to the_month as string
set the day of the_date to the_day as string
set date of selectedItem to the_date
–uncomment the following two lines if you want to remove the date from the description
–set the the_name to (characters 12 thru -1 of the the_name) as string
–set name of selectedItem to the_name
end repeat
end tell
2.) This one I got to work, but for some reason it was making the creation date two days later than what was indicated in the file name.
– Set creation date based on name "Title YYYYMMDD”
tell application id “DNtp”
try
set theRecords to selection of viewer window 1
if theRecords = {} then error “Nothing selected.”repeat with thisRecord in theRecords set theName to name of thisRecord set theFileName to filename of thisRecord if theName = theFileName then set revPath to reverse of characters in theFileName as string set theSuffix to reverse of characters 1 thru ((offset of "." in revPath) - 1) in revPath as string set theName to characters 1 thru -((length of theSuffix) + 2) in theName as string end if set theCreationDate to creation date of thisRecord try set day of theCreationDate to (characters -1 thru -2 in theName as string) as integer set month of theCreationDate to (characters -3 thru -4 in theName as string) as integer set year of theCreationDate to (characters -5 thru -6 in theName as string) as integer set creation date of thisRecord to theCreationDate end try end repeaton error error_message number error_number
if the error_number is not -128 then display alert “DEVONthink” message error_message as warning
end try
end tell
Here’s the original of this one unmodified.
– Set creation date based on name "# Title - YYYY-MM-DD-HHmmss”
tell application id “DNtp”
try
set theRecords to selection of viewer window 1
if theRecords = {} then error “Nothing selected.”repeat with thisRecord in theRecords set theName to name of thisRecord set theFileName to filename of thisRecord if theName = theFileName then set revPath to reverse of characters in theFileName as string set theSuffix to reverse of characters 1 thru ((offset of "." in revPath) - 1) in revPath as string set theName to characters 1 thru -((length of theSuffix) + 2) in theName as string end if set theCreationDate to creation date of thisRecord try set seconds of theCreationDate to (characters -1 thru -2 in theName as string) as integer set minutes of theCreationDate to (characters -3 thru -4 in theName as string) as integer set hours of theCreationDate to (characters -5 thru -6 in theName as string) as integer set day of theCreationDate to (characters -8 thru -9 in theName as string) as integer set month of theCreationDate to (characters -11 thru -12 in theName as string) as integer set year of theCreationDate to (characters -14 thru -17 in theName as string) as integer set creation date of thisRecord to theCreationDate end try end repeaton error error_message number error_number
if the error_number is not -128 then display alert “DEVONthink” message error_message as warning
end try
end tell
This should do it.
You can post properly formatted code if you wrap it in three backticks and a new line:
```
script
```
-- Set creation date based on name "NAME YYYYMMDD”
tell application id "DNtp"
try
set theRecords to selected records
if theRecords = {} then error "Please select some records"
show progress indicator "Renaming... " steps (count theRecords) as string with cancel button
repeat with thisRecord in theRecords
set thisName to name without extension of thisRecord
step progress indicator thisName
set theCreationDate to creation date of thisRecord
try
set seconds of theCreationDate to 0
set minutes of theCreationDate to 0
set hours of theCreationDate to 0
set day of theCreationDate to ((characters -2 thru -1 in thisName) as string) as integer
set month of theCreationDate to ((characters -4 thru -3 in thisName) as string) as integer
set year of theCreationDate to ((characters -8 thru -5 in thisName) as string) as integer
set creation date of thisRecord to theCreationDate
end try
end repeat
hide progress indicator
on error error_message number error_number
hide progress indicator
if the error_number is not -128 then display alert "DEVONthink" message error_message as warning
end try
end tell
1 Like
This worked perfectly! Thank you! May I ask how you figured to modify the original script for it to work?
1 Like
I wrote the original script 
It’s quite easy once you understand how (characters X thru Y in theText) as string works. Then you just need to count the characters. The minus - indicates that we’re counting from the end of the string. Probably best to simply try it yourself.
You might want to take a look at Class Reference - text in the AppleScript Language Guide. It’s definitely not needed though. If you read it it’s probably best to ignore what you don’t understand and simply try the given examples.