Multi-user sharing

[cygnl7]

I've looked around quite a bit for a solution to this but haven't come up with one yet. If anyone has an idea regarding how to accomplish this then I'm all ears. Otherwise, it's feature suggestion time!

I take notes for a number of different meetings. For the sake of this description, let's say these are Meeting X and Meeting Y. These meetings have different people attending them (let's call them Users X and Users Y), and I wish to share the notes for each of the meetings with each of those who attend the meetings. I don't want Users X to see the notes from Meeting Y, and vice-versa.

Dropbox sharing is great as far as getting the files to other people. Not only does it cover the sharing angle, it covers the authentication and authorization, too.

However, Trunk Notes' dropbox integration (as far as I can tell) won't let me take full advantage of dropbox authorization. Here's what I mean: I can specify Folder X to be shared with Users X within dropbox. However, I have not been able to find a way to have Trunk Notes write to various folders.

Page namespacing would work, but so far I haven't been able to figure out how to get Trunk Notes to do that. For example, I would like to write to <configured dropbox folder>/MeetingX/20110411Notes and then share the MeetingX folder with Users X. The only drawback here is that links could potentially be broken if they reference other pages outside of MeetingX, but I can live with that, and in fact might be a great solution so that I can continue to have a "master index" page that points to all the notes for myself (and others who are allowed to see all notes).

Another solution would be the possibility of configuring multiple base directories in the settings and then have a mechanism to switch between them. This would give each meeting (or whatever the logical separation is) it's own self-contained, separate wiki.

Is there a way I can accomplish what I'm trying to accomplish with the current version?

[kyle]

It introduces more software, but if you already happen to have a copy of Hazel on the Mac, you could set it up to move/copy specific files from your TrunkNotes folder to your shared folder in Dropbox.

[cygnl7]

It introduces more software, but if you already happen to have a copy of Hazel on the Mac, you could set it up to move/copy specific files from your TrunkNotes folder to your shared folder in Dropbox.

Thank you for your suggestion. That looks like it would work.

I really would like to have a solution from within Trunk Notes and not have to rely on external software, though. Plus I'm not sure I want to potentially be working with copies when not on the original device.

[cygnl7]

The more I think about it, the more I like just being able to have a hierarchy for the wiki pages. Is there currently no way to put a wiki page in a "directory"? I feel like I'm missing something really obvious here...

[mgkennard]

Hierarchies can be imposed using a naming convention - for example the default Trunk Notes uses : - e.g. Docs:Manual. This is similar to some other wikis. The disadvantage of the : is the Dropbox for Windows doesn't like :'s. However this wouldn't solve your requirement of having different notes being written to different folders, to which you can assign different access writes. I can't immediately think of a simple solution to this. Although for very big wikis having all files being synced into one folder might become impractical - although Dropbox has very large upper limits on the number of files in one directory (10000+). There have been consistent requests for having a number of 'books' in the wiki - if I ever get around to implementing this that might be a solution to your problem (as each book would likely have different sync settings.)

Matthew
Apps On The Move

[cygnl7]

Yes, having multiple "books" would work.

What about an option (or by default) having the dropbox sync convert ':' to the folder hierarchy? Does this break other functionality?

For example, if I had TopLevel:Level1:Doc1, it would convert that to TopLevel/Level1/Doc1. Although I suppose that could get tricky since there might also be a TopLevel:Level1 document. Documents would have to have an extension or something to differentiate them.

Anyway, it's a thought. Maybe there's a simple solution there. Otherwise consider this another vote for the "books" feature. Even if it was as simple as allowing the switching of the dropbox prefix easily.

[andersson.j]

Off the top of my head, this is how I would do it: (The drawback is that it requires an external computer running the same dropbox account.)

• Set up a naming convention for notes, e.g. append the clients company name: NoteNameCompanyX.
• Set up an automatic script on an external computer (running the same dropbox account) that creates a symbolic link between notes named dropbox/trunk/*CompanyX to dropbox/CompantXsharedNotes/*CompanyX.
• Share the folder dropbox/CompanyXsharedNotes with CompanyX.

As soon as you create a note named *CompanyX and sync it with dropbox, dropbox will sync it with the external computer. The script on the computer will detect the new note and create a symbolic link. Once it is set up it is automatic and with symbolic links you're not dealing with mulitple copies of the notes.

Here are some tips on setting up symbolic links.