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An Email Trick--slightly advanced

Posted on: Thursday 9/14, 2006;  11:25 PM

This posting describes how to find the Diary or Notebook that you sent a particular email from.  It is a somewhat advanced discussion and departs from the point-and-click interface to give you a very small glimpse of the functional understory of A WorkLife FrameWork.

When you compose an email within a Diary in A WorkLife FrameWork and then click on the button the email is placed in your default email client for you to subsequently send.  If, later on, you come across this email in your email archives, you might want to know what was the originating Mathematica Notebook in which it was composed.  

One trick to allow you to track this is to place in the email the unique identifier of the Diary or Notebook you composed it in.

Each Diary or Notebook that you create in A WorkLife FrameWork has associated with it a unique identifier (also known as a GUID for Globally Unique IDentifier) that is used to keep track of it.  This identifier is easy to extract from the Diary or Notebook using the function NotebookGUID.

For example here is the unique identifier of the Diary that I am writing this Blog entry in:

If I put this GUID as text within an email that I am sending (or for that matter within any other file that I want to be able to associate with this Diary), I will have all the information that I need to find the Diary once again at a later date.  

Since, when you create a Diary or Notebook within A WorkLife FrameWork it is recorded in an internal database called DiariesNotebooksAndPackagesDatabase, you can then use the DatabaseFind function to locate the original Diary or Notebook.  Here is the example for the Diary that I am writing this Blog in:

{{"WLFW Blog.nb","/Users/dreiss/Documents/Mathem docs/VariousPackages/DiaryDevelopment/Testing and Marketing/WLFW Blog.nb",48015232338587634317603141129378919826,"Diary",None}}

While there are several bits of interesting information here, the one most pertinent is the full path name of the originating Diary:  /Users/dreiss/Documents/Mathem docs/VariousPackages/DiaryDevelopment/Testing and Marketing/WLFW Blog.nb

If we then use this as the argument to the Mathematica NotebookOpen function, the sought for Diary will be opened:

Of course in this case, the notebook in question is already open and I am typing in it...

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