Hello Agenda team,
I would like to request a way for an AI assistant (for example, ChatGPT or Claude) and its authorised integrations, such as MCP or an official API, to retrieve or export the original PDF file attached to a note when given an agenda://note/… link or note ID.
I am testing a workflow in which I ask an AI assistant to open an Agenda note, find its attached PDF, and upload that PDF to a web form in Safari. At the moment, an integration can identify that a note contains an attachment, but it cannot obtain the original file. The workaround is to open Agenda, export the attachment manually, and then select the exported file in the web form. This makes the workflow slow and error-prone.
A read-only operation such as “list attachments” and “download/export attachment” would be very useful, with the same permissions and sync behavior as the user’s Agenda account. It would allow an authorised AI assistant to fetch the requested PDF on whichever Mac is being used and pass it to a form without requiring a manual export step.
Is this planned, or is there a supported way to do it today?
Thank you.
Thanks for the clear write-up.
There is no supported way to do that today. The MCP can tell you that a note has an attachment, but it can’t hand over the original file. Exporting it by hand from Agenda is the only route at the moment.
A tool to list and export attachments would fit well with the rest of the MCP. We’ll take it along.
A quick update on this. I’ve added it, and it will be in the next release of Agenda.
There are two new MCP tools in the Mac app:
agenda_list_attachments takes a note id and lists the files and drawings in that note, each with an id, name, type and size.agenda_get_attachment takes the note id and an attachment id. Agenda makes a read-only copy of the original file and returns its path, so the assistant can pass it on to your web form.
If the client can’t read files from Agenda’s folder, it can ask for the file contents directly instead (as base64). Locked notes are excluded.
Thanks, Drew! This is fantastic — and exactly the use case I had in mind.
Being able to retrieve attachments from an Agenda note and pass them directly to a web form could make a huge difference to my workflow.
I have one question about handling multiple attachments.
I’ve been testing an alternative workflow where the documents are stored in a normal local folder. When a web form accepts multiple files, having the assistant select and upload three files from the folder in a single operation is significantly faster than uploading one file, then another, then another.
With the new MCP tools, I understand that agenda_list_attachments can list all the attachments in a note, while agenda_get_attachment retrieves one attachment at a time.
Would an MCP client be able to retrieve several attachments this way, keep them available as a group, and then pass all of them together to a web form that supports multiple-file uploads in a single operation?
In other words, I’m wondering whether retrieving them individually through agenda_get_attachment only affects how the files are obtained from Agenda, or whether it could also mean that they would have to be uploaded to the web form one by one.
If they can ultimately be passed to the form together, this could potentially replace the local-folder workflow entirely for my use case.
Thanks again for adding this — I’m really looking forward to testing it in the next release!
Retrieving them one at a time only affects how the files come out of Agenda. Each call to agenda_get_attachment gives you a separate copy on disk, and the copies stay there until Agenda is next launched, so the assistant can fetch three in a row and then hand all three paths to the web form in one go.
Whether the upload itself happens in a single operation is up to the client and its browser tooling, not Agenda. If it can upload several files from a local folder together today, it should be able to do the same with these copies.
Perfect, thanks Drew! That answers my question.
This sounds very promising for my workflow. I’ll test it with multiple attachments and a web form as soon as the new release is available.
Thanks again for implementing this so quickly!
Let us know how it goes once you’ve had a chance to try it.
New release is out now! Give the new MCP a try.