Re: [Bibdesk-users] Showing Bibdesk attachment paths

[Christiaan H. <cmh...@gm...>]

On Oct 16, 2014, at 10:51, Christiaan Hofman wrote:

> 
> On Oct 16, 2014, at 2:42, fa...@hu... wrote:
> 
>> After a frustrating few months trying to use use Zotero, Mendeley,
>> Papers, etc. I've settled upon using Bibdesk as a reference manager.
>> In particular, I'm trying to set up the use of a bibtex library and
>> bibdesk file attachment structure (my main .bib file is in
>> GoogleDrive/papers/ and all the attachments should be auto-filed under
>> GoogleDrive/papers/author/). I use relative file structure.
>> 
>> I've been running into the problem where I'll create an attachment on
>> one computer, but when I try to access it under another computer, the
>> attachment (within the Bibdesk attachment pane) showed up as unlinked.
>> 
>> I'm trying to track down the issue, but it would be much easier if
>> there was a way for me to obtain the file path that Bibdesk is
>> *trying* to access. Is there a way to do this? I imagine this sort of
>> functionality would be accessed by right-clicking on the attachment
>> and having an option "List file path" or something similar.
>> 
>> Thanks!
> 
> 
> BibDesk doesn't really store the file path, so it cannot report it, unless it knows the file. The alias it stores is for us a black box, Apple does not offer a way to peek into it.
> 
> Christiaan

Also, it does not really look at "a" path. What is stored is various pieces of information to look up the file, such as relative paths, file nodes, and full paths. As I said, most of that information is not even accessible to us.

For your case, you should make sure that either the relative path between the database .bib file and the linked files is the same on both computers (this is preferable as this is the first way they're looked up), or otherwise that the full path to your linked files is the same on both computers. Otherwise, it will never find the file, because file nodes will never match on different computers.

Christiaan