a quick and native way to store workflow preferences?

[juliosecco]

I think it would be nice and very quick to have an Alfred object to store / retrieve workflow preferences and data from / to JSON

 

thank you!

 

     Giulio

[vitor]

That’s not really feasible. Workflow preferences are dependent on how the developer codes them, and you cannot ensure consistency, there. Alfred can’t guess them.
 
The best you could achieve would be to have a standard where you ask developers to follow a certain pattern, and I guarantee that wouldn’t work across the board. I, for one, would certainly not follow it when not appropriate. There’s a weird fetishisation with JSON as the end all to store data, when it isn’t really appropriate in many cases, especially if you’re just storing preferences locally. If I’m making a bash workflow and need a two line preference file, why would I include a JSON parser and make my it more complex, when cat suffices? In some cases, it would even actively lead to a worse experience to the use (e.g. my WatchList workflow where you may edit files by hand).

 

Tangentially, I see no use case for this other than it being (dubiously) nice to have.

[juliosecco]

OK,

I in reality was thinking at this thing as a possibility to have a really quick way to store and retrieve some text, without Alfred even knowing what is storing and which format it has.

the format and the content would be obviously dependent of the developer

The JSON was just an example but it could be simply text formatted as you want.

I thinked about JSON because Javascript and PHP can natively parse it.

Edited April 10, 2016 by juliosecco

[deanishe]

OK,

I in reality was thinking at this thing as a possibility to have a really quick way to store and retrieve some text, without Alfred even knowing what is storing and which format it has.

 

The problem is there's no API for asking Alfred for things. Alfred runs workflows as external processes and reads their STDOUT. It doesn't embed Python/Ruby/JS etc., so there isn't really a way to talk to Alfred. Try a workflow library instead.

 

There’s a weird fetishisation with JSON as the end all to store data, when it isn’t really appropriate in many cases, especially if you’re just storing preferences locally.

 

So very true. JSON was never intended to be anything other than a code-to-code serialisation format. That's why it doesn't even support comments.

 

It's almost certainly not the best choice for a configuration language or for storing data in any given situation (unless you're coding in JavaScript).

Edited April 10, 2016 by deanishe