For awhile now I’ve been wanting to learn more about scripting DEVONthink Pro, but I’ve just never gotten around to it. I think one of the reasons I’ve been putting it off has been that I’m not all that interested in learning AppleScript — it’s one of those special-purpose languages that I’d only use occasionally and would thus have to re-learn every time I needed to do something in that language.

A few days ago, Apple employee Laurent Sansonetti announced the first release of RubyOSA, a “bridge that connects Ruby to the Apple Event Manager infrastructure.” Well, whatever — it’s an extension that allows you to script Mac OS X applications in Ruby instead of AppleScript. It was interesting timing, because Hamish Sanderson had only recently announced his rb-appscript project, which seems to serve exactly the same purpose.

After installing RubyOSA, the first order of business was to generate some documentation and get an idea of what my options were for scripting DEVONthink. RubyOSA includes a command-line utility named rdoc-osa, which generates RDoc-like documentation for a given application:

$ rdoc-osa --name "DEVONthink Pro"

The resulting documentation reveals a number of kinds of application objects that one can work with, but it was still a little unclear to me what was what. After some educated guesses, I came up with this preliminary test program:

require 'rbosa' app = OSA.app('DEVONthink Pro') app.open_database '/Users/lyle/Documents/Knowledge Engineering.dtBase' app.current_database.records.each do |record|   puts "Record #{record.name} is of kind #{record.kind}" end

Which produces the output:

Record News Feeds is of kind Group Record Software Development is of kind Group Record Semantic Web is of kind Group Record Apple Mail is of kind Group Record Documents is of kind Group Record @Inbox is of kind Group ...

OK, so the database’s records accessor returns an array of Record objects, each of which is a reference to a top-level group in my DEVONthink Pro database. The next trick is to see how I can get at the items in a group (specifically, the items in the “@Inbox” group). According to the RDoc, Record has an accessor named children, which returns an array of Child objects, and Child is a subclass of Record. So I move on to the next iteration of my test:

require 'rbosa' app = OSA.app('DEVONthink Pro') app.open_database '/Users/lyle/Documents/Knowledge Engineering.dtBase' app.current_database.records.each do |record|   if record.name == '@Inbox'     record.children.each do |child|       puts "Item with name '#{child.name}' is of kind #{child.kind}"     end   end end

Which produces the output:

Item with name 'Why do I need a Semantic Web?' is of kind RTF Item with name 'The Power of the Marginal' is of kind RTF Item with name 'Ready or not...' is of kind RTF Item with name 'The Semantic Web Revisited' is of kind RTF Item with name 'Panasonic Speaker Phone Manual' is of kind PDF+Text Item with name 'RubyAndRdf.rdoc' is of kind rdoc Item with name 'Proposal Stuff.doc' is of kind RTF Item with name 'www.oreilly.com/oreilly/author' is of kind URL ...

So with really just a small amount of work, I’ve got a framework for doing some more advanced scripting of DEVONthink Pro, using Ruby. One of the projects that I’d like to take on with this is to convert some of the old FOX mailing list archives (which I currently have as mbox files) into individual RTF documents and then import those into DEVONthink. I’m interested in seeing how DEVONthink’s classification and search capabilities do with this kind of content, and what kinds of patterns it can discover for me. Hopefully I’ll be able to follow up on this article soon with the results of that project.