This may be more of a DA request, but I think it’d be really nice if when you were browsing web pages with the DA browser, a little icon could show you if that page was already in your DT database, either as a link, HTML or an archive.
That would save me from accidentally adding the same thing twice.
Jay P.
Hi, Jay. That ‘icon’ would trigger a search in your DT Pro database for every page you load into DEVONagent, which could result in a lot of activity by your computer.
Whenever I suspect that I may have already captured a page I’m looking at in DEVONagent, I can select the title of the page and press “Command-/” to invoke a Lookup in the database. The DT Pro search window will open. To speed up the search, I make it a Phrase search rather than an All Words search (a Name search can be even faster).
I usually capture data to my database by selecting the text and images of the DA page and using the contextual menu option to add the selected text to DT. The new content then appears in my Incoming group.
What’s the worst that can happen if I send over content that’s been previously captured? A duplicate will result. That will become apparent, because the name of the new content will be displayed in bold blue text.
When I look in my Incoming group at the new content, I simply select and delete the items that are duplicates.
Not necessarily. All I’m looking for (myself) is checking of duplicate URLs. DT would just have to keep a separate list of each URL it knows about, and pass that list to DA on startup. Much like when you start typing into Safari’s location bar, and it will offer autocompletes based on the URLs you have in your history+bookmarks, you can access huge lists of URLs without having to recheck the entire database each time. Heck, even Google supports an AJAX autocomplete option, and I think it’s safe to say that their database of URLs is much bigger than any of us will ever get on our Macs 
Yeah, this is essentially the scheme I use right now. It’d just be nice to drop out all the post-processing steps necessary in DT, to deal with duplicates.
Jay P.
Jay, I don’t see how sending from DT Pro to DA the list of URLs previously bookmarked or tagged to downloads would function well, unless the options provided were far from simplistic.
I’ve got over 10,000 URLs associated with my main database’s content.
A large number of those URLs are specific to a certain article, e.g. a paper published in a journal. But many of those URLs are for pages that change content frequently, without changing the URL.
For example a site sometimes covers special topics at various times, that may lead me to download the main index page. That index page may, a few weeks later, again constitute an interesting type of reference materials, perhaps on a completely different topic. I don’t want to be prohibited from downloading such a page multiple times, just because the URL (but not the content) is identical for each of my captured notes.
That’s not the only logical (and real) issue. If I take a note as an excerpt from a Web page, and then take another note based on other content in the same page, those notes would have identical URLs, but would not have the same content.
So if a URL-based flagging system were to be implemented in order to prevent me from capturing duplicate pages, how could it be designed to work without driving me crazy with the need to frequently override it, and how could I tell whether what I want to capture would or would not be duplicative?
Maybe “sending” it is the wrong conceptual model. I’m talking about more of an active connection between the two (on a low level, a standard UNIX socket would be fine, but I’m sure Cocoa allows for something nicer). Mostly I want DA to be able to quickly query DT, to see if some URL is already in the database.
I would personally never want it to prohibit me from anything. All I’d like is a little icon in the window (maybe just at the bottom), showing me if the URL already happens to be in the database. It would be up to my own good judgement to decide whether or not I actually want to then still archive it to DT.
Some websites it obviously doesn’t make sense, some it does.
That’s a very valid concern. In my original post though, I suggested the use of different icons, based on the “type” of URL. So if you just have a link to the URL, it’ll show that. If you have an archive, it’ll show that. If you have RTF notes from that URL, it’ll show that (I guess it might have to show multiple icons).
And I think it would make sense to be able to click the icon, and have DT come up showing the duplicates in the database.
I’ll stress again that I would not want this system to prevent anyone from doing anything, I just want it as a little reminder saying “Hey, you’ve already got this URL!”
I’ll tell you my non-DT situation where this happens all the time: del.icio.us. I have almost a thousand URLs in my del.icio.us bookmarks, so obviously I don’t remember everything that’s there. I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve been on a page, clicked my “Add to del.icio.us” bookmarklet, and then discovered (after bringing me to the “Add” page) that I had previously bookmarked that exact page.
It’s not such a problem in del.icio.us, because it doesn’t allow duplicates of the same URL. But with DT, it’s possible to have duplicated URLs. And that’s fine, but I’d prefer a little flag beforehand to let me know that I’m about to duplicate it