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integrating notes database with pertinent files
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Posted by jimspoon
May 23, 2016 at 09:50 PM
For anything I might make notes about, I probably have pertinent files stored in folders on my hard drives. So if I’m looking for something I might have to do at least two searches to find something I’m looking for - a search of my notes database and a search of my file system. I’ve long wanted to have my my file system somehow integrated into my notes database, so that the contents of my files will also show up in a search of my notes database. Of course I can manually put links to files in my notes database, but I would like for my notes program to monitor specified folders, find new content, and integrate it into the notes database.
I would be very interested to hear how other people pull relevant file contents into their notes databases, and what tools might do some part of this work.
Posted by gunars
May 23, 2016 at 11:02 PM
RightNote lets you have Attachment note types (the document is copied into the database) or Link note types (the document is just referenced by the link). In both cases, the contents of supported documents (txt, rtf, htm, html, doc, docx, xls, pdf) are indexed and searchable. I haven’t used these myself, so I’m not sure how it handles an indexed Link type when the external document changes.
Posted by gunars
May 24, 2016 at 03:43 AM
Answer from Rael (RightNote author): If you open the file via RN it will monitor changes for a link or attachment, however it won’t monitor changes made outside of RN.
Posted by Dr Andus
May 24, 2016 at 12:00 PM
jimspoon wrote:
>So if I’m looking for something I
>might have to do at least two searches to find something I’m looking for
>- a search of my notes database and a search of my file system.
>I’ve
>long wanted to have my my file system somehow integrated into my notes
>database, so that the contents of my files will also show up in a search
>of my notes database. Of course I can manually put links to files in my
>notes database, but I would like for my notes program to monitor
>specified folders, find new content, and integrate it into the notes
>database.
There seem to be several problems implied here. Which one is your priority?
1) Is the main problem that your linked files are not searchable (indexed) from within your notes database?
2) Or is the problem that you’d like to automate the linking of your files in your notes database (maybe on the basis of some rules, or all of them all the time)?
3) Or is the problem that the manual linking of files to notes is too cumbersome in your current notes database?
In terms of setup, one decision might be whether you want your notes database to be a holder of curated links (which would mean that you’d still need a separate desktop search solution for searching the contents of non-linked files, if and when needed), or a hold-all database, a de facto mirror image of your document folders.
Posted by jimspoon
May 25, 2016 at 01:20 AM
Very good questions. One can imagine various degrees of integration of “notes” and “file content”. For me, the more integrated, the better. So that when issues a query, the results may contain content from a notes database, and content from files, mixed together and organized in any number of different ways. The information manager or outliner would be able to access the content of external files very quickly - perhaps by taking advantage of an index maintained by another program, perhaps Windows Desktop Search.
(Just as an aside, Deskrule by the author of xplorer2 does not itself index files, but uses the Windows Desktop Search indexes.)
Maybe the ultimate in what I am thinking of is a merger of an outliner / info manager with a desktop search program. So that, not only can one retrieve content of external files, but one can then structure, categorize, that content.
But even if an outliner falls far short of this kind of integration I would still be interested in hearing in how different outliners can access and perhaps even manipulate the content of external files.