rubyfocus

Rubyfocus is a one-way (read-only) ruby bridge to OmniFocus. Analyse, store, inspect, or play with your projects and tasks in OmniFocus from the comfort and flexibility of ruby!

Installation

Via rubygems

gem install rubyfocus

Via git

First download rubyfocus to your computer:

git clone https://github.com/jyruzicka/rubyfocus.git

Now build and install it!

gem build rubyfocus.gemspec
gem install rubyfocus-0.5.16.gem

Usage

Getting set up

To create a new database from your local OmniFocus install:

require "rubyfocus"

f = Rubyfocus::LocalFetcher.new # This class lets you access a local OmniFocus install
d = Rubyfocus::Document.new(f)  # This is how we create a document linked up to a local fetcher

d.update                        # This is how we get the document to update using its built-in fetcher

d.save("ofocus.yml")            # Save the whole database to yaml!

To open it up again, it's even easier:

require "rubyfocus"

d = Rubyfocus::Document.load_from_file("ofocus.yml")   # Your document will remember everything
d.update                                               # Updates it against the local cache, in case you made changes

Grabbing data

How do you access all that lovely data? Easy!

d.projects
d.tasks
d.contexts
d.folders

And if you want to select a certain project's tasks:

d.projects.first.tasks

What if you want to select only certain projects? Sure, you can use standard Array#find or Array#select methods, but you can also make use of a hash of values:

d.projects.select(name: "Sample project")

Once you have your objects, you can query them for more information:

t = d.tasks.first
t.name # => "Sample task"
t.project.name # => "Sample project"
t.deferred? # => true/false
t.start # => Time or nil

SyncServer-ing

To access an instance of the Omni Sync Server, use an OSSFetcher object:

f = Rubyfocus::OSSFetcher.new(my_username, my_password)
d = Rubyfocus::Document.new(f)
d.update

If you use the Omni Sync Server, you'll definitely want to save your data locally and just update what's necessary - it takes a while to download and apply all those files.

Behind the scenes

OmniFocus stores its data as a "base" XML file plus a series of "patches". These are all stored as zip files inside an ".ofocus" package. This means that you can have several different devices, all storing the OmniFocus task database at different states, and each one can easily update its database by comparing the various patches against its own database and downloading/applying only what's needed.

Rubyfocus makes use of this by fetching and reading OmniFocus' local store on your machine. As long as your local OmniFocus is up to date, rubyfocus will be able to fetch the database in its latest state.

Further work

rubyfocus is a work in progress. In the near future I hope to release a more comprehensive document detailing exactly which details of OmniFocus' projects and tasks are available to the user, and what you can do with them.

My main goal is to register with the Omni Sync Server, so you don't need to always delete + reinstantiate the database.