DTPO gives you the option of building Spotlight-visible metadata for its databases. It’s stored in:
“/Users/…/Library/Caches/Metadata/DEVONthink Pro 2/” by the UUID of the database, and then by the uuid of the database record, plus a “.dtp2” extension (approximately).
It’s some work keeping all those 31-character file and folder names in your head, so the following script will retrieve the Spotlight metadata for a file selected in the database:
tell application "DEVONthink Pro"
set metadataUUID to uuid of (selection as reference) & ".dtp2"
set databaseUUID to uuid of database of item 1 of (selection as reference)
end tell
set spotlightData to ""
tell application "Finder"
set fullPath to a reference to (home as string) & "Library:Caches:Metadata:DEVONthink Pro 2:" & databaseUUID
set metadataFolders to folders of folder fullPath
repeat with i in metadataFolders
set metadataFiles to files of i
repeat with j in metadataFiles
set filePath to (name of j)
if metadataUUID = filePath then
set filePath to POSIX path of (i as string) & filePath
set spotlightData to do shell script "mdls " & "\"" & filePath & "\""
end if
end repeat
end repeat
end tell
set result to spotlightData
Caveats: I’m using this with Keyboard Maestro, which has a nice text window to display the results. You’ll have to fiddle to get it to create a text record in DTPO, or whatever you might need, if you don’t have a similar setup.
Works for a selection of one item, no error checking if you do otherwise.
Only briefly tested (works for me!). And as usual, back up your precious data, and don’t throw blames if you go down in flame.
Enjoy, Charles