This is a support question on if it is possible for me to import a large number of work log entries into Agenda. Essentially, I need a way to import multiple notes that each have a date associated with it. Does Agenda use SQLLite? If so, maybe I can import directly into the database.
What I did: Created a daily work log using various other software for the last 10+ years. I can export into a csv with the date in one column and content in another. The content contains line breaks.
What happened: As I move through different jobs and computers, I export/import my entries to different software. I would like to try Agenda as my daily work log, but would like to import all my previous entries (~3,000). I don’t see a way to import each entry en mass while maintaining the date for each entry/note.
What I expected: An import mechanism to import notes with a date associated to each, such as a csv.
Things that might be helpful to know (Agenda version, OS and model, etc): macOS 10.13.4, Agenda 2.2.1
This is definitely a very advanced request, so we haven’t got any nice import menu to do it. But we do have a structured JSON file format called Agenda Archive. What I would recommend is that you export a note as Agenda Archive (File > Export), change the file extension from .agenda to .zip, and unzip the file. You should find the JSON data in there, and you should be able to see the structure of a note.
You could also export a whole project with some notes, and do the same trick as above.
The idea would be to write a script that takes your data, and generates JSON files, which you can then zip up, change the file extension to .agenda, and import.
Not trivial, but it sounds like you have the skills to do this sort of thing.
Yes, this sounds like it will work. It’ll take some scripting to get my current data to JSON. I’ll update this topic with my results. It may be a few days or the weekend until I can get to it.
I’m in a similar situation, but with personal journalling I’ve been doing with Ulysses. No way I’m manually importing hundreds of entries, though…
Also interested to hear how Agenda does with a large database.
Hmm. Pasting works fine for the odd one-off item but I’ve got a couple hundred to deal with.
The “copy as TaskPaper” option in OmniFocus yields a pretty decent text approximation of the task, but if you paste it into Agenda, it all lands in the body of the new note — there’s no way I can tell to automatically get it to parse the item title and body separately. Fine to do this manually for a few items but not so fun in a batch
TaskPaper and OmniFocus are both task apps, so the overlap there is better for transforming between them. Agenda is a note taking app, so the closest we could get to an OmniFocus task would be a checklist item. We’ll see if we can improve this in future.
Ok, I’ll admit that I never got to this. I did take a look at the JSON format and it’s certainly doable, though it’s more complex than I expected. I don’t have as much a need in my new job to log daily entries, so the need to create a migration script waned.
