I want to be able to open DEVONthink from a shortcut and view the contents of the Global Inbox.
I can do this for any other group given the groupUUID as follows:
Get DEVONthink item with groupUUID → xItem
Open xItem for viewing
I tried using the UUID for Global Inbox which is inbox but that doesn’t work.
I know that Global Inbox isn’t a group, but rather a database, but I use it just as I would a group in practice.
I can solve a similar problem in the Create Item action by short clicking on the Group parameter and then manually selecting Global Inbox in the search list.
However this technique doesn’t work for Open Item because Global Inbox doesn’t appear in the search list.
Unless you’re trying to do other things with the shortcut I suggest you skip the shortcut. There’s a quick way to get right to the Global Inbox from your Home Screen.
Long press on the DevonThink icon on your Home Screen.
Contextual menu pops up and select Global Inbox.
Fair enough! My shortcut now uses open URLs for any group or the Global Inbox and all is well - thank you.
If you will indulge me, I would like to share my thought process which led to me trying to use shortcuts and the Global Inbox and where I got stuck because the Global Inboxis a database, not a group, and unlike the url scheme that is agnostic to this, shortcuts are not. Maybe it will be helpful to others approaching the problem from a pure Shortcuts perspective.
The problem seems to be that, from a user perspective, the Global Inbox and regular groups seem very similar because they are both places to store and view documents. However, they must be treated differently in Shortcuts.
For example, when I am saving a PDF to a group (groupUUID), I do the following:
Get DEVONthink item with groupUUID → xItem
Create file with title xName in xItem
This doesn’t work when the destination is Global Inbox, and I have to create a special case where I use the search UI in the action itself after a short tap on In Group to manually set the destination to Global Inbox. Then I have:
Create file with title xName in Global Inbox
I can’t find a way to have the same code save to any group or the Global Inbox by setting the destination in a variable.
If I set the variable to Global Inbox it will search for any group containing that in the title, not just theGlobal Inbox.
If I set the variable to inbox then that doesn’t work even though Global Inbox has the UUID=inbox the Get DEVONthink item action only works if the UUID is a group or document, not a database.
In summary, I had expected that the Shortcuts that handle groups would also handle the Global Inbox as a group, but that is not the case.
That is correct… because the Global Inbox is not a group; it is a database. The only thing special about it compared to other databases is it doesn’t have a separate internal Inbox.
