Script Usage
 

Sure!

1 - Back up your things database and back up your OF database
2 - Open both applications
3 - In OF revert back to the default database (so you can see exactly what my script imports)
4 - Run the script and see what happens (there are some great tutorals on the web for learning how to run and edit an apple script if you need help in that area)

My script imports your projects across. It moves tasks inside of areas without projects, to an OF project named after the Area (thanks Kimomni). It does not put the projects inside an area folder (this would be nice). It looks for tags with an @ in front like @Home and @Mac and assigns a context in OF. In all it should do most of the work for you.

Once you have a good feel from steps 1-4 above restore your old OF database and run the script again to add your Things data to any existing OF data you have.

Hope this helps. Let me know how it goes.
Ab

[QUOTE=whpalmer4;71000]
The underlying problem seems to be that the importer is broken -- I'm not able to get it to understand start/due dates or durations. I've filed a report.
[/QUOTE]

It turns out that if you set the column type in OmniOutliner to date, the dates will be successfully imported, otherwise they will be inserted into the notes field as metadata. Why that is necessary when OmniFocus has been told that a certain column is a date, I can't say. I retract my previous claim that the importer is broken with respect to dates, and wish to substitute an assertion that someone needs to either document this shortcoming or remove it :) Durations, however, are still broken. Either nothing comes across (for example, if you have a fractional hour), or the units are wrong (1h in the OO doc becomes 1m in the OF doc).

This has very little to do with the Things->OF importer script as it currently stands, but is provided for completeness if someone finds this thread while searching for information on importing into OF...

It might be worth taking a look at this post:

[URL="http://forums.omnigroup.com/showthread.php?t=7453"]http://forums.omnigroup.com/showthread.php?t=7453[/URL]

Missing Dates and Contexts
 

Hello everybody!

I tried to use the applescripts in this thread to migrate all my projects and task from things to OF. The script works as expected except from 2 things:

- dates are not taken over
- tags are not taken over

what could i be doing wrong? do all the tags have to have @ in front for the script to work? can i change the script so it can work with tags without @s. I do have more than 60 different tags and don´t want to change every tasks tags manually (which would be hundreds of changes)???

all of my tasks and projects do have due dates but the corresponding fileds in OF stay empty after running the script? Is there any setting i have to change in the script?

thanks for your answers and the scripts in advance.

updated script — preserves dates
 

Hi — thanks to "A to the B" for his Things —> Omnifocus script.

I tweaked it a little bit to preserve creation date, start date, and due date.
Hope this is helpful!

This is the second migration for my 200+ item todo list in the past month!

I finally gave up on The Hit List due to lack of responsiveness from the developer + major duplication bugs syncing with iCal.

I tweaked someone else's script to move everything into Things, which I had bought around version 1.0 but found inflexible and easy to lose things in. My old impression was confirmed once again (though I liked the iPhone app), so I decided to try OmniFocus. We'll see (9 days left on trial) but looking good so far.

Anyhow, here are the script additions. Perhaps someone else can do whatever tag support is needed? I didn't really use them for the short time I was using Things.

Good luck!

[CODE]

--------------------------------------------------
--------------------------------------------------
-- Import tasks from Things to OmniFocus
--------------------------------------------------
--------------------------------------------------

-- Added: creation date, due date, start date functionality

tell application "Things"

-- Loop through ToDos in Things
repeat with aToDo in to dos of list "Next"

-- Get title and notes of Things task
set theTitle to name of aToDo
set theNote to notes of aToDo
set theCreationDate to creation date of aToDo
set theDueDate to due date of aToDo
set theStartDate to activation date of aToDo

-- get dates
if (creation date of aToDo) is not missing value then
set theCreationDate to creation date of aToDo
else
set theCreationDate to today
end if

if (due date of aToDo) is not missing value then
set theDueDate to due date of aToDo
end if

if (activation date of aToDo) is not missing value then
set theStartDate to activation date of aToDo
end if

-- Get project name
if (project of aToDo) is not missing value then
if (area of aToDo) is not missing value then
set theProjectName to (name of project of aToDo)
end if

else if (area of aToDo) is not missing value then
set theProjectName to (name of area of aToDo)
else
set theProjectName to "NoProjInThings"
end if

-- Get Contexts from tags
-- get all tags from one ToDo item...
set allTagNames to {}
copy (name of tags of aToDo) to allTagNames
-- ...and from the project...
if (project of aToDo) is not missing value then
copy (name of tags of project of aToDo) to the end of allTagNames
end if
-- ...now extract contexts from tags
copy my FindContextName(allTagNames) to theContextName

-- Create a new task in OmniFocus
tell application "OmniFocus"

tell default document

-- Set (or create new) task context
if context theContextName exists then
set theContext to context theContextName
else
set theContext to make new context with properties {name:theContextName}
end if

-- Set (or create new) project
if project theProjectName exists then
set theProject to project theProjectName
else
set theProject to make new project with properties {name:theProjectName}
end if

-- Create new task
tell theProject
set newTask to make new task with properties {name:theTitle, note:theNote, containing project:theProject, context:theContext, creation date:theCreationDate}

if (theStartDate is not missing value) then set the start date of newTask to theStartDate

if (theDueDate is not missing value) then set the due date of newTask to theDueDate


end tell

end tell -- document
end tell -- OF application
end repeat -- Main loop
end tell -- Things application


--------------------------------------------------
--------------------------------------------------
-- Get context from array of Things tags
--------------------------------------------------
--------------------------------------------------
on FindContextName(tagNames)
-- Example usage
--FindContextName("@Mac", "1/2hr", "High") -- FYI, my tags are context, duration and priority

repeat with aTagName in tagNames
if aTagName starts with "@" then
return aTagName
end if
end repeat
return ""

end FindContextName -- End FindContextName


--------------------------------------------------
--------------------------------------------------
-- Remove the CRs from a string,
-- not used in this script,
-- carry over from prior implementation
--------------------------------------------------
--------------------------------------------------
on ReplaceText(find, replace, subject)
-- Example usage
-- ReplaceText("Windows", "the Mac OS", "I love Windows and I will always love Windows and I have always loved Windows.")

set prevTIDs to text item delimiters of AppleScript
set text item delimiters of AppleScript to find
set subject to text items of subject

set text item delimiters of AppleScript to replace
set subject to "" & subject
set text item delimiters of AppleScript to prevTIDs

return subject

end ReplaceText -- End replaceText()


[/CODE]

how to export/import logbook info?
 

Hi guys. The script worked like a charm for me...except it didn't transfer the Things "logbook". How do I get all that info into Omnifocus? Thanks.

Thanks for the script (right above this post) but it's not working properly.
It won't differentiate between Projects. Everything is imported to the Project "NoProjInThings".
Ok - it's not too bad because I was going to sort it again. But the problem is - that the import stopped after approx. 15 minutes with the following error message:
[quote]error "„OmniFocus“ hat einen Fehler erhalten: missing value kann nicht in Typ rich text umgewandelt werden." number -1700 from missing value to rich text[/quote]

In English: OmniFocus received an error: missing value can't be transformed into the type rich text.

And it stopped :o(

FWIW a first draft of [URL="http://bit.ly/THINGS2OF"]a script[/URL] which takes another approach:
[LIST][*]Projects and single actions are imported from THINGS to a date-stamped folder in OmniFocus.[*]The Things tag tree is imported as an OmniFocus context tree,[*]Things delegations are assigned as OmniFocus (people) contexts,[*]Things duration tags (sub-tags of "⨀", of the form [N]m or [N]h) are converted to OmniFocus durations,[*]and other THINGS tags are prefixed by @ and added to names of Projects/Actions in the style of Taskpaper.[*]Items tagged with "High" in Things are flagged in OmniFocus.[/LIST]
[COLOR="White"]--[/COLOR]

[QUOTE=RobTrew;90294]FWIW a first draft of a script which takes another approach:
[/QUOTE]

I tried this script. Where should I send bug reports? Most the bugs I encountered were in handling special characters that the terminal didn't like (or maybe those problems were just bugs in the output log on the terminal??)

Thanks for testing it.
I understand that another user has taken this script up and improved it, and that its descendant may appear on github soon (I'm afraid I never really had much Things data to test it with :-)