If a note's $AutoFetch value is true, Tinderbox automatically updates the note's $Text to use data drawn from the source stored in the note's $URL. The latter may be any of:
- URLs accessible via the Web.
- locally installed app pseudo-protocol URLs, e.g. "devonthink://…", "bookends://…", etc.
- local URLs, e.g. "file:///…".
The AutoFetch process facilitates automatically updating note $Text from other text sources. As well as the more obvious sources such as web pages or RSS feeds, AutoFetch works with a range of file types, including text, rtf, Microsoft Word®(.doc), pdf, and markdown (.md) files.
Once AutoFetch has run, the note containing the retrieved data also has its $ReadOnly attribute automatically set to true. This avoids the user trying to edit text that will get automatically overwritten when AutoFetch next runs.
Including the first setting of the process, when does AutoFetch run on a note and alter its $Text:
- on (re-)setting $AutoFetch to
true. - on document load, all existing AutoFetches run once.
- on (HTML-type) Export, all existing AutoFetches run once to refresh the exported content.
- while the document is open, no more than once every 5 minutes as part of the general agent & rules cycle. The time to the next cycle is shown in the circular 'Network' display on the the Agents & Rules tab of the Tinderbox Inspector.
For deeper, more complex, be aware of the experimental attribute $RawData, which holds existing raw data (not post-processed) should the next planned fetch fail.
Post-processing AutoFetched data
It is possible to process imported data, before it is added to the note's $Text. This is done by setting valid action code in the same note's $AutoFetchCommand, whose operation is described separately in AutoFetch commands.