[ee99ee]

We have a web-based system for tracking projects and tasks for users. I would like to integrate this with OmniFocus so that when a new task is assigned to a project, it gets put into OmniFocus for the user.

I have setup OF to use a custom WebDAV server. On this server, I see many XML files that show changes committed during various sync commits. How do I merge these XML files and generate an accurate view of the latest sync? Why is so much old data kept on the server?

-Chris

[ee99ee]

I guess a better question may be is does there exist a library for parsing the format of the OF contents.xml documents to generate an accurate "view" of the data and to manipulate the data? Is this just part of CoreData or this is something specific for OF (or something else?)?

-Chris

[whpalmer4]

Originally Posted by ee99ee

We have a web-based system for tracking projects and tasks for users. I would like to integrate this with OmniFocus so that when a new task is assigned to a project, it gets put into OmniFocus for the user.

I have setup OF to use a custom WebDAV server. On this server, I see many XML files that show changes committed during various sync commits. How do I merge these XML files and generate an accurate view of the latest sync? Why is so much old data kept on the server?

-Chris

OmniFocus will collapse the transactions if you get all the sync clients synced together at t=0 and then again at t > 60 minutes. This policy is intended to make the system more robust in the face of a really slow sync operation from one of the clients. As a practical matter, it does mean that you have to have all the clients on (and running OmniFocus, and able to communicate with the sync repository) at approximately the same time occasionally so they can all be synced up. I've got two of my three OF clients running on the same machine (one in Tiger, the other in Leopard), and I do get the database compaction, so obviously they don't have to be active simultaneously as long as everything has been synced recently. If I did Bonjour sync (or ran my own WebDAV server), however, I would not be able to do this if the master copy was kept on the machine that dual boots.

[whpalmer4]

Originally Posted by ee99ee

I guess a better question may be is does there exist a library for parsing the format of the OF contents.xml documents to generate an accurate "view" of the data and to manipulate the data? Is this just part of CoreData or this is something specific for OF (or something else?)?

-Chris

Have a look in the Extras forum for people doing related things. A couple of relevant threads that I recall:

http://forums.omnigroup.com/showthread.php?t=9359
http://forums.omnigroup.com/showthread.php?t=9306

Note that you may not really have to get an accurate view of the data if you are just injecting new projects (think the Quick Entry window) as opposed to trying to insert something in the middle of an existing project.

[ee99ee]

Is there some sort of library that can parse the data on the WebDAV server and give me an accurate view of the data? I know some parts of Omni are open-source I think....

-Chris