I understand there are wiki links available, but don’t think this would work for my scenario. Nor do I think the “Merge” command would be appropriate.
For example, I have a rich text document that is a cut and paste from an email as one item in DT. I also have a Word document that is discussed in the email. They are part of the same issue at hand.
I file these both in the relevant folder in my DT database, but what I would like is some kind of hyperlink or reference between the two, tying them together. So if I look at the email, I can click a link to take me to the Word file, and vice versa.
Since asking my question, I’ve been looking through the forum archive, and it seems like the best solution at the moment is to copy the Item Link from the Edit menu, then paste that link into the URL field of the other document.
This will work where there are two documents, or multiple documents with one ‘source’ but I guess it won’t scale very effectively.
I guess my mind is heading into the realm of mesh networks/Mindmaps now, which is probably outside the scope of DT.
I have sometimes done this by making one of the documents the main document, probably in this case the rich text one, and creating an annotation out of the other one.
To add to the above, that’s pretty much how I do it as well. Hoping DTPO3 brings something new, but in the interim, it works well enough.
To be clear, I would create a RTF annotation automatically that is linked back to that ‘main’ document (using the built-in option), and then paste the item-links into that annotation. I would then repeat the process over on the related documents, and have the item-link of the ‘main’ document inserted into them. Essentially, this creates the bidirectional linking you probably want, albeit through the ‘secondary’ conduit of the associated annotation documents/files. A bit clunky, but it works.
I see, so you are keeping the items as single files, and a list of links to them.
You are not including the files as attachments to the annotation themselves.
I understand that annotations can act as containers for other documents - for example I created an annotation then dropped a Word document onto it. However that means that DT can’t see/index the Word file, as it only looks at the ‘surface level’ of the annotation, it can’t index attachments of the annotation.
Correct. I occasionally do both - use the Annotation(s) to set up bidirectional links, AND drop a copy of the file I’m linking to, inside the annotation. That way, when opening the annotation note, I can “see” the document being linked to there, and can either get what I need there and then (since it ‘exists’ inside that annotation), or I can then link to it, using the wiki-link.
That said, I essentially treat the annotations as mental index cards that are attached/paper-clipped onto my actual files, with those index cards providing information about relevant/linked documents. They serve to create a secondary spider-web of interlinked files, as an additional layer, to the underlying source documents.
Actually you can achieve what you want to do fairly easy with a clever insight korm had a few years ago. URL links can point to groups, smart groups and tags.
In other words you can put the documents, or replicants of the documents, that are related into a group and use a URL link from any document, including documents in the group, to the group. Groups themselves can also have URL links for linking related groups.
There are a number of scripts in the forums that automate this method to create quite sophisticated annotation schemes. korm had a particular clever keyboard maestro script to do this but I cant locate it at the moment.
It would be fairly trivial to create a script to automate the creation of a group of replicants for all selected documents and fill in the URL fields for the documents.
I use a similar script which imports my email, turns them into pdfs, and creates URL linked groups of replicants for the attachments. That way I can always see the attachments for the particular email in a similar manner to what an email client might show.
