Table of contents
Purpose
This section provides more technical documentation about Doctor Drafts. It is intended to help people create their own extended use cases, by providing information about the workflow and the flows it contains.
Design
Doctor Drafts was designed to not only provide lots of functionality, but also to make it easy for users to tailor it to their own requirements without changing the underlying workflow. By doing this, it means that as updates are produced for Doctor Drafts, users can update the workflows without fear of losing any customisations they may have created. While Alfred does include migration features, overlapping clashes can still theoretically occur, and this design aims to mitigate that.
There are two related pieces of functionality that Doctor Drafts utilises to enable this. Variables and External Triggers.
As flows execute, they can create, modify and read values from Alfred variables. These variables are what Doctor Drafts uses to allow users to customise its use, and effectively become the engine behind the user’s own flows. The user simply sets up the variables with the appropriate values and Doctor Drafts takes care of the rest.
External Triggers allow flows to be called by other flows within Doctor Drafts, allowing for re-use and reduced maintenance, and from within other workflows in Alfred. In fact, using AppleScript, you could even trigger an External Trigger from other locations such as Keyboard Maestro, Better Touch Tool, or a command line script, though the easiest re-use is within Alfred.
As you may have seen in the Extended Use section, you can set variables, call External Triggers, and build new personalised flows.
Flows: External Triggers
The main content of this documentation section are details of the flows; specifically the parts of the Doctor Drafts workflow that are surfaced to re-use via External Triggers. The starting point for this is the external triggers, which gives you an easy to consume breakdown of what’ available and links out to the relevant documentation you can find elsewhere within this section.
Within each section, you will find a description of what the flow does, details of any variables it makes use of, details about any outputs, a graphic of the flow, and any additional notes about how the flow functions.
Change Log
The change log for the Doctor Drafts workflow can also be found in this section. It includes details of changes and download links for the versions.