Sonny Software

I'm trying to drag-drop a selection (c.80 items) into Tinderbox6 using the Cmd+Opt+drag method to transfer reference data. However, if I select all items in the current Bookends view when I click the list to start the drag, it collapses the selection. With a large number of items, dragging each reference one by one will be a bit of a pain. Am I missing a step somewhere.

For clarity, Cmd+Opt+drag of a single item does work OK. Actually there's a slight issue at the TB end re data mapping to TB attributes but I don't think that's a BE issue and I've raised the subject elsewhere.

Thanks.

I'm not sure what you mean about collapsing the selection. Maybe you can contact tech support with a screen snap?

But note that you can't drag more than one hypertext link at a time (well, you could, but they wouldn't work). This is a limitation of the way URIs are handled by OS X, not Bookends. I actually wrote code that let you do such a drag, but the URIs didn't work when clicked on in the target application.

Jon
Sonny Software

Ah, OK. Looks like I need to do a a text-based export of some kind (RIS?) then figure out how to map all that data in Tinderbox. I guess it might actually be faster to to 80 x drag/drop.

Anyway, thanks. It's at least stopped me from going up a blind ally.

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By 'collapse', I mean that is I have all items in the main view selected, on clicking anywhere in the selection to start the drag, all other items bar the one under the mouse as immediately de-selected. IOW, it seems the selection change is triggered on the mouse-down action. Where multiple item drags allowed - as i know know are not - then the selection would need to wait for mouse-up to update the selection and allow a selection to be clicked and dragged. I hope that clarifies things!

Thanks

Yes, it does, thanks. That's on purpose -- since you can't drag multiple hypertext links at once, Bookends selects the one you clicked on to drag. It's visual feedback that reinforces the fact that dragging multiple links isn't possible.

Don't forget, the Command-Option-drag is for dragging links back to Bookends. If you want to drag the metadata (authors, title, etc.) to Tinderbox you'd use a different mechanism. For example, if you Option-drag from Bookends all 80 references, formatted according to the selected format, will be dragged to Tinderbox.

Jon
Sonny Software

FWIW, (and not by way of argument!) if you Opt+drag a multiple selection form BE (v12.5.9) to TB v6.3.x you get a single item added in TB albeit one whose text contains data on every item in the selection. However, that result still leaves a lot of clean-up to do at the TB end to end up with a note per dragged source item. By comparison, the Cmd+Opt+drag BE->TB creates a TB note with lots of reference related metadata parsed into TB attributes (aka fields). I don't know the mechanics of the latter as to whether TB is using the BE hyperlink to then pull metadata about the reference or simply uses the drag modifiers as a signal to do extra processing on the dropped data.

I'm not suggesting a right or wrong here, inter-app data transfer is all too often more complex in practice (edge cases!) than we users suspect.

The parsing of the data into Tinderbox is done by Tinderbox (sending AppleEvents to Bookends to grab the data). It's not a simple transfer of data.

When you use Command-Option-Shift, the formatted reference data from all selected refs is placed in the drag (this is true regardless of whether you're using Tinderbox or not). It's one "item", which is what you want in almost all cases (it's really intended for moving formatted refs or bibliographies to a word processor, not another database). If you wanted something different done with that data (or any other), it would have to be initiated on the Tinderbox side, not Bookends.

Jon
Sonny Software