Script for Transferring Comment into Spotlight Comment

DEVONthink Automation
1

I transferred many rich text files from Journler, and I have a number of columns automatically populated. The column that interests me the most at the moment is “Comment” in DTPO. I browsed through previous posts and I saw that the differences between the Comment and Spotlight Comment are not straightforward. The bottom line for me is that I need to work with the column I can easily edit, and in this case that would be Spotlight Comment. So the question for me is–how can I quickly transfer all the information from the Comment column to the Spotlight Comment column? Is there a script for this? Is anyone willing to write one for me?

2

This script copies the comment:


tell application id "DNtp"
	set theSelection to the selection
	repeat with theRecord in theSelection
		try
			set theMD to meta data of theRecord
			set theComment to |kMDItemComment| of theMD
			if theComment is not "" then set comment of theRecord to theComment
		end try
	end repeat
end tell

BTW:
The Comment of rich text documents is also editable via the Document Properties panel, therefore this script might not be necessary.

3

Hi Christian,

Thanks for the script. Since I do not work with scripts often, I am not sure what I should do with it now. Can you, or someone else, please remind me how to copy the script and where?

After I read your message, I found the shortcut to bring up the Document Properties Panel. It does work, but I need something that will save me the extra steps, so I will likely switch to using Spotlight Comments. I am just hoping that by doing so I won’t create future problems.

In Journler, I was using the comment section to add the date of published articles. This way I could see a list of the articles organized alphabetically by clicking on the Name column, and I could see them organized chronologically by clicking on the Comment column. I want to have this flexibility in DTPO, which is why I need to be able to edit the Comment column easily.

Please let me know if you think that using Spotlight Comment for this purpose may cause problems. I almost never use Spotlight search on my mac.

4

Select & copy the code, launch the AppleScript Editor.app, create a new script and paste the code. Afterwards switch to DEVONthink, select the items that should be processed by the script, switch back to the AppleScript Editor and execute the script.

You could also use the creation/modification date instead, these dates can be changed via the Info panel.

5

Thank you for the tips, cgrunenberg.