Making Bookends scriptable

[cboulanger]

Hello Jon,

one feature that I would love to see is if you could make Bookends more open to external scripting. This would allow to add features for uncommon use-cases without you having to add them to the software. For example, I have lots of incomplete citations that I could easily automatically complete using a script which draws from public bibliographic webservices. Or, I have tons of PDFs that have filenames that can be matched with record datat automatically. Bookends cannot do this. Manually, this would take days. But if I had a way of accessing Bookends records through a simple API, this would be a matter of minutes. I tried to use the Bookends Server to do this (using PHP), but that's not really what the server has been written for, and I ran into all kind of wierd problems.

I guess the easiest way would be to allow Apple Script more access to Bookends internals. Of course, my favorite would be if you could link to the javascript engine included in Mac OS X, this would allow to do amazing things (Apple Script isn't really a language one wants to program in). This would also allow to use alternative citations systems such as citeproc-js [1].

I know you have to concentrate on features that are requested by many, and scripting doesn't belong to that group. However, in the competitive market of bibliography software it could provide another advantage to Bookends if there was a user-generated pool of scripts that could bring additional functionality to Bookends as add-ons. I, for one, will eventually have to look for an alternative to Bookends in which I can more freely play with my data, because I cannot afford to update all these references by hand. That would be a shame, because I think Bookends is a great piece of software which has served me very well.

Best,
Christian

[1] http://gsl-nagoya-u.net/http/pub/citeproc-doc.html
https://bitbucket.org/fbennett/citeproc-js/wiki/Home

[Jon]

Thanks for the suggest. This is an enormous undertaking, and really only would apply to a very small number of savvy users. Having said that, you do know that you can export references to text files (tab-delimited, or in a defined format like PubMed), use scripts to manipulate those files, and then import the altered text. I don't know if that suits your needs or not, but you might want to look into it.

Jon
Sonny Software

[cboulanger]

Hi Jon,

thanks for the quick reply and I fully understand that this isn't a top-of-the list issue, given the cost of implementing it and the little demand behind it. The problem with exporting, manipulating, and re-importing is that I loose all my relational data such as folder associations, and it is also a very tedious process.

Wouldn't one simple solution be to ship a small command line executable that would take an sql query as parameter, run it against the embedded database and return the raw output? Like this, power users could run whatever scripting language they use to access the bibliographic data more directly. Of course, these users would be on their own peril, but they would be much happier users!

Best,
Christian

[Jon]

You can execute sql commands on your database with an external tool now. Contact me off-forum and I'll tell you what to use (it's not a deep secret, but it's a powerful tool, not for the average user -- or even the relatively advanced one).

Jon
Sonny Software