Share attachments (PDFs) to Dynalist on Android

🌟Features
#1

I now use Dynalist as my may planning & task tool. A large part of that involves managing reading materials. mainly arxiv papers. I usually discover these while on mobile. My biggest frictione point is getting the documents or direct links to them efficiently into Dynalist. ATM I can share the arxiv link to Dynalist, but that links to the page hyml page. I would have to manually add the PDF attachment or a link to the PDF if I want to be able to start reading the paper directly from dynalist. I usually store the paper in a reference manager (currently Mendeley but I am looking at alternatives) and would be happey to send articles to Dynalist from there. Unfortunately Dynalist either does not come up as a sharing target or only accepts some metadata from these apps. I have eve tried sharing from Mendeley by sending an email to Dynalist. Everything I have tried ends up putting only partial if any information in Dynalist which needs to be completed on the desktop in order to get a a smooth experience on the desktop - ie alink going directly to reading from Dynalist. What I am after is

  1. put an attachment or a direct link to the document into Dynalist using Android sharing
  2. be able to open the above document with one click from dynalist

Trello is has the best example of this functionalisty I have seen so far, but I need Dynalist’s functionality to keep track of the big picture.

#2

Dynalist does not currently support uploading files via anything other than the upload button on Android, so it will be hard. Especially with how tricky things are on Android vs Desktop for everything related to sharing.

What I would do is use a third party intermediary that works the way you like. I think Dropbox and Google Drive are good options. Perhaps register an account on the one you don’t normally use, and have it be only for arxiv PDFs. Then share to a folder on the drive. Rename the PDF by the paper title if possible.

From there, to get a list of direct PDF links in Dynalist, I would create an IFTTT/Zapier with rules “If new file added to drive folder, create a dynalist formatted share link to the file and insert it into this node in dynalist”. On IFTTT that would use the Webhooks ingredient and the Google Drive ingredient.

EDIT: just discovered https://apidocs.dynalist.io/#upload-file-pro-only

#3

Thanks! That is more complexity than I want to inroduce atm. I am linking to the arxiv html pages for the momont & living with the extra click when I am reading. The extra indirection seems acceptable for now.