Show Attachment in Finder not working

[guylaine]

Hi!

Title says it all I guess...
When I right-click and select "Show Attachment in Finder" for a reference, it just goes to the user home folder.... not to the attachment itself. It used to work fine, but has been broken for some time now. Not sure what is happening.

Attachment folder is set to Default (ie. Users/username/Documents/Bookends/Attachments)
This folder is local on the Mac. Indexed in DEVONThink (which incidentally, can also not "Show in Finder" if I select an item within Attachments or the Attachments folder itself, although it works for any other item, including the enclosing Bookends folder).

I'm a bit lost as to what could be causing this, and don't know where to start.

Ideas?

[Jon]

It's possible that Bookends doesn't have permission to show the attachment in the Finder. You can start by giving Bookends Full Disk Access in System Preferences. If that doesn't work, in Privacy make sure that Bookends can talk to the Finder. Of course, you never know when a reboot might help.

Jon
Sonny Software

[guylaine]

Thanks for the quick reply!

I have given Full access to Bookends and rebooted, but it still doesn’t work.
I’m not sure what you mean by « make sur that Bookends can talk to the Finder ». What item should I specifically be looking at in Privacy?

[Jon]

Select Automation in the left pane and scroll through the right pane looking for what apps Bookends can send/receive AppleEvents to/from.

Jon
Sonny Software

[guylaine]

OK got it. But there are only 2 items below Bookends in that section: Microsoft Word, Mail.
Any idea how I can modify this? I don’t see an option to add/delete any of these, only to check/uncheck what is already there…
Thanks!

[Jon]

You can't add to that, only the OS can. You can reset all AppleEvent permissions in Terminal using tccutil.

tccutil reset AppleEvents

Google to read about what this does. Here's one such hit.

https://apple.stackexchange.com/questio ... ermissions

Jon
Sonny Software

[guylaine]

OK I did that and rebooted. Issue remains. I read a bit about resetting AppleEvents further (ie. booting in Safe Mode and deleting some systems files), but I’m not sure I want to go down that road, at least not yet (I don’t particularly like messing with Systems files…)

I created another user account on the Mac to see what should happen for this feature to work when I first open Bookends. In that account, it just works. I do not get any window asking for permission to let Bookends do « something » (which is the way items get added in the Automation pane of Privacy if I understand correctly). Plus, there is nothing in that Automation pane, and Show attachment in Finder still works fine. So I’m not sure AppleEvents is the problem here?

Anyways, I think reinstalling Bookends may be the next step? I’m a bit reluctant to do this now since I have spent a lot of time tweaking the settings, and I have custom fields containing important data that I would not want to lose. So if I reinstall, what else besides the Attachments folder and the Library folder should I backup to reuse with the new install?

Unless you have another suggestion about the next troubleshooting step?

Thanks again for your help!

[Jon]

Appleevent permissions may not be the problem, but it's really the only thing I can think of. Maybe someone else reading this will have another idea.

You can download Bookends and move it to the Applications folder. Don't uninstall/reinstall any files, just the app. And if that doesn't work, you might try moving the attachment folder to the Desktop and telling Bookends it's there in Preferences. There's simply some OS issue that's independent of Bookends and these are tricks to try to work around them.

Jon
Sonny Software

[guylaine]

OK that I did already. I thought there might a more comprehensive way to reinstall Bookends that would get reset some kind of preference or what not.

So everything is working now, and I feel a bit stupid because I think the problem may have resulted from a mistake I made I don’t know when?
So I just moved the attachment folder somewhere else, and pointed to it. It did work! But I then It « broke » the Index path to DT… So I thought, why not try to put it back and see what happens. Well, instead of selecting Factory default as the Attachment folder location in Bookends settings, I selected Other and navigated to the folder (Bookends) that encloses the Attachment. So in the settings, the Attachment folder location is /users/username/Documents/Bookends and NOT /users/username/Documents/Bookends/Attachments. Duh

Anyways, all is good. Posting this just in case someone runs into this. Thanks again for your help!

[Jon]

All's well that ends well.

Jon
Sonny Software