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.
Any suggestions?
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.
2 Likes
Thanks for that - I learned something.
However this question pertains to an issue that I am having with a bigger shortcut and would still like any shortcut-based solutions.
Thanks
Why are you using Open Item? It’s just a URL so use Open URLs.
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 Inbox
is 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 the Global 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.
PS: This is working just fine…
That’s interesting. Thanks for following up, I was using just the UUID instead of the full link. Bravo!