Introducing paperpAlfred

If you use Alfred I wrote a workflow to query your Paperpile library and access your saved PDFs. Feedback welcome!

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This is really nice @giovanni, thank you very much for making this! :smiley:
A question: looks like it requires an export of Paperpile library. Currently some testing of Github automatic export/sync is available and working, would it be possible to have this Workflow point directly to a public Github repo with a sync-ed BibTeX file?

Thank you @lalarabbit, glad you find it helpful. Unfortunately the BibTeX export (which is now available directly from Paperpile) is missing a lot of fields needed for paperpAlfred to work (folders, labels, paperpile ID, google drive ID etc). so a version of the workflow based on BibTeX export would have fewer features … but it is appealing to have a always-up-to-date database and it could be done if others are interested. Ideally paperpile will extend this feature to their JSON export.

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Perhaps we could suggest to Paperpile to allow users to configure what fields to be exported to the sync-ed BibTex file. Tagging @vicente and @stefan here for this. It would be so nice not having to manually export the database regularly.

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Implementing a JSON-based export that would include the fields mentioned by @giovanni is within our scope and could be fairly simple to achieve after rolling out the updated web app and extension. We will be sharing a roadmap and some surveys covering this and other relevant topics very soon, so please make sure to share your feedback there as well.

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This looks amazing! BUT I keep getting ‘Error: No such table: papers’ message when I type PPP in Alfred. Any suggestions? 🤷 I double checked the instructions.

happy to help. what is the size of your JSON file? if you are willing to share it I can help troubleshoot

Thanks, giovanni! It’s 19.6mb. And technically it’s a .txt file, correct? That’s how it downloaded.

one of your book chapters had a null year. Try this updated version and let me know!

Thanks, Giovanni. I really appreciate it. Alas, I still get the same error even after updating to 2.2.

Oh sorry I should have clarified, that is because the database is not getting rebuilt. Could you either download the JSON file again, or rename it and name it back so that the timestamp changes? This will trigger the script to rebuild the database.

YES!!! It’s happening! Thanks again for putting together this workflow!

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Just wanted to add my voice here. This would be a great help and seems (from my naive perspective) to be a fairly easy lift.