Today I try something with Archive and when it went wrong, I decide to redo everything and import a backup. To my surprise, the copy does not save the original edited date. I would like to suggest that the backup keep the original edited information.
P.S. I also send an feedback request for document retrieval. Please help. Thanks.
Update: Thanks for the quick help, I really appreciate it.
Thanks for the feature request! We should definitely output the creation/last edited date in OPML and also import it.
Sorry for reopening this old thread, @Erica, but I’ve been meaning to ask the same question:
To make an educated guess, adding meta-information to the OPML is relatively easy, but honoring it in an import is likely far more difficult since it’s generally easier to pull information out of a system than to modify it.
I understand wanting to do this right and maintain parody between exports and imports, but IMHO it’s important to include all meta-information (especially dates) in the OPML backups regardless. From a user perspective, I’d be far more understanding of a message explaining that imports are still being improved, than to realize all too late that my backups were missing data that I had been counting on.
It’s not very urgent to me, personally, but that’s only because I’m a [student] developer; before I began to invest time/data in Dynalist, I was careful to confirm that the API responses included creation dates. I wrote a shell alias that updates my local [JSON] backup and commits/pushes it to version control. But I don’t expect that solution to be pragmatic for most of the friends and family who I’ve encouraged to use Dynalist.
Thank you guys for all your work on this platform!
I’d really like this too. It’s not exactly a “backup” if it doesn’t re-create the original! In my workflow, I rely on having these dates. Please add the ability to output and restore the creation/modification dates in the OPML backup (or any other backup format). Expansion state also seems to be missing - is there anything else?
@Adam_Lee I looked at the API documentation, and it seems you can get the content of a document, including creation dates, with POST https://dynalist.io/api/v1/doc/read. I guess you’re using that to create your own JSON backup files. But there doesn’t seem to be any way in the API to create a whole document, nor to create individual items with dates. So you have backups that can’t be restored. Is that correct?
Is there actually any way to make a complete backup and restore?
Being able to import/export the dates in OPML (or get/set in the API) would also help with transferring files from other outliners. I’ve seen dates encoded like this:
<outline text="testing 123" created="Sat, 29 Jun 2019 21:24:19 GMT+2" changed="Fri, 02 Apr 2021 23:14:52 GMT+2">
There are at least three other outliners that can import that particular format: NoteTaker, Legend/Moo.do, and CircusPonies Notebook.
You could also use a Unix timestamp like 1552959309804 from the API, but it doesn’t include time zone information, is not human-readable, and I don’t know of any other outliner/OPML applications that support that. But it would be better than nothing!