Perspective URL links on OF3

I’ve not seen this particular question and/or answer anywhere. I’m trying to google, but I’m currently in a combat zone in another country with spotty internet that, on the best of days, is 3G speed (if we sacrifice ten boxes of MRE, four hundred feet of det cord, and a mosquito net).

I am jumping back and forth between Things and OF (I know, I hate myself and just love to make myself miserable). The biggest draw of Things is it is exceedingly good to look at, EASY to manipulate ANYTHING on iphone, and Things has better syncing between devices than OmniFocus. I don’t know how anyone could test this theory out, but I’m a platoon sergeant for an infantry platoon and I keep track of a lot of stuff and I’ll sync Things and OF on my laptop and iphone (no cellular here, but lots of cobras and camels) and Things is faster every day of the week.

But, OF has more powerful focus abilties. I can really create the exact thing that I’m wanting, such as a list of tasks that are available that I must ASK one particular squad leader about, put in order of due date, and not be cluttered with other stuff. Or what tasks I’m waiting on from Supply and the TNCO regarding admin issue for my platoon. ETC.

Anyway, I got pretty good at creating some Launch Center Pro shortcuts for Things. So much so that I prefer to open it now to go to something. I would crank up LCP and click on my WORD tab, which was merely the ‘anytime’ list filtered by tags ‘army’ and ‘word’. It is a good system.

At first it looks like you can do that for OF, but you can’t.

You can’t list more than one tag to view. Why is this a big deal? Because you cannot create a URL link to a perspective. There are many webpages out there about URL links to perspectives for OF2 (omnifocus:///perspective/name) but this doesn’t work at all in LCP. Instead it takes you to the Inbox. If you select the option in LCP, it gives you this (omnifocus:///perspective/{{name}} but when you use that, it too takes you to the Inbox. I couldn’t get it to work on iPhone, iPad, or Mac.

I’ve found no documentation anywhere of how to link to URLs for perspectives. Someone, I forget where, wrote in an blog how you could get links for tags, projects, tasks, and perspectives in OF. But this isn’t an option in iOS. On MacOS it isn’t an option at all for Perspectievs.

This is a shame, really. OF has so much user friction in nearly every aspect of use on iOS, especially when compared to the elegant use of Things, that the large saving grace of OF has been its Perspectives. Yet trying to use those outside of the app is, so far for me, impossible.

I’m running all the latest software on iOS and Mac. It takes me 3-6 days to download it, but I try my best to keep up with updates.

Okay, thanks for letting me ramble. I’ve got to go prep ammo and weapons.

To access a Built-In perspective, like Review, seems to work here (all lowercase):

omnifocus:///review

Now, if you want to access a Custom perspective, like one called Errands,

omnifocus:///perspective/Errands

Does it work for you ?

Thanks for the help. But it does not work for me. I’ve tried upcase, lower case, singular and plural. I’ve tried brackets and no brackets. No worky.

I’d give screenshots, but this internet is so slow, it won’t semd pics via text/whatsapp/messenger/ig most of the time.

Okay, found out something. Ish.

I’ve got a long list of perspectives, 46 of them (because you can’t filter via tags on the fly or by area).

I’ve been testing with omnifocus:///perspective/Army and it hasn’t worked. I tried it with another perspective, and it hasn’t worked.

So I opened my macOS app and looked at those perspecties with a star next to it (so they show on the sidebar) and tried one of them (omnifocus:///perspective/CDP for example) and it worked on my iOS. I tried another one with a star, and it worked also.

I thought I had found a bug, that only starred perspectives worked. But then I tried one that wasn’t starred, and it too worked. So then I doubted my sanity and I tried omnifocus:///perspective/Army again. It still does NOT work. I went down the line, trying every one, and most worked, but I found a handful that doesn’t work.

I opened up the perspective viewer window to see if any were old pre 3.0 perspectives or what. But all have been upgraded to 3.0 types. I couldn’t find anything that was a glaring difference in those that worked and those that didn’t.

Tomorrow I’ll recreate a perspective from scratch (that’s a duplicate of one I use a lot) and see if it will work. B

Thanks again for your help.

Make sure you percent encode any perspective names with spaces. So, for example, to access a perspective called This Week, it would be:

omnifocus:///perspective/This%20Week

Thanks Unlocked. None of the ones that didn’t work are more than one name, example “Army”. I even tried writing it with a space after it, with a %20 after it (in case there was one in the name somehow) and so on. With machine guns there is a phrase called “accuracy through volume” meaning that if we dump enough rounds downrange, one of them will hit the target. Mostly because with a machine gun you WILL bounce all over the place because of the recoil. Automatic rifles (like an M4) are just plain stupid. You can’t control the recoil and people don’t realize how heavy 15 magazines are until they carry them.

That was a tangent. Coffee starting to kick in.

Yeah, I’m still looking into it and will report any findings.

SOLVED:

Okay. I got to thinking after my last post, there was something that I hadn’t checked. I was using %20 in the URL in case I had spaces in the names, but I hadn’t checked the names of the perspectives if I had any spaces. Sure enough, the ones that weren’t working did have a space after the word. For example {{Army }} or Army_ (without the underscore).

I took out the spaces with macOS app but sync is so slow (been ten minutes and I’m still waiting, meanwhile, Things has already synced across). So I went into the iOS app. However, editing it in iOS still did not work. So I deleted the name and retyped it, ensuring there was no space after Army. And voilà! It works.

Now I’m off to a sniper range. It’s a lot of work on a deployment, but you can’t beat drinking your coffee while the sun rises on a foreign horizon and you’re throwing lead down a range to work on shooting fundamentals.

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