Path

DEVONthink Tips
1

Possibly related to the fact that I am using DT on two computers and trying to keep them synced (I posted about problems with that last week), I am occasionally getting the following:

With a PDF that is copied to the database folder, the PATH attribute gets corrupted, although the URL attribute still points correctly to the file in the local database.

For example, I have a record called Hansen 1999.pdf
The path has gotten corrupted somehow and now points to:
"/Developer/Documentation/Cocoa/Conceptual/DisplayWebContent/Concepts/WhyWebKit.html"

But the URL still points correctly to the file:
/Users/weeks/Library/Application Support/DEVONthink/Files/Hansen 1999.pdf

I can manually fix this in the Info window, but I wonder what is happening.

It seems random what the PATH will point to when corrupted.  On another file, it points for example to:

/Library/Printers/EPSON/Help/Help_W/PrintSettingA.help/Contents/Resources/French.lproj/D4_07.HTM

Help!

John

2

DT uses both paths and aliases to reference file and probably aliases cause this trouble (as file IDs are different on different machines). The advantage of aliases is that DT is able to find the referenced file after it has been renamed or moved on one machine. On the other hand, this can cause the mentioned problems on different machines. Best solution is probably to use always the path if the referenced file exists and ignore the alias. V1.7.4 will do this.

3

Christian,

Terrrific: thanks very much.

John

4

Hmm, this sounds similar to what happened with the Path for a bunch of link entries in the database when I moved the database from Jaguar to Panther and didn’t have the same directory structure…

5

Actually it’s the same problem.

6

The unpredictable Path behavior I was having seems fixed in 1.7.4.  Thanks!