Table of contents

1. Beyond the Basics
   1. Principles
   2. What are Variables and External Triggers?
   3. How Do I Start?

Beyond the Basics

Hopefully, you have by now, installed Doctor Drafts, taken a look through the Basic Use section, and perhaps had a go at using it to interact with Drafts. At this point, you should be ready for the next step, which is to start using Doctor Drafts to meet your own particular needs.

Doctor Drafts has been designed to make this relatively easy to do, and allow you to use the complexity and power built into Doctor Drafts with the least amount of effort, and with zero risk to breaking Doctor Drafts.

Principles

If you follow these basic principles, you won’t go far wrong.

1. Never change anything in Doctor Drafts.
2. Always work in your own workflow.
3. You do not need to copy anything from Doctor Drafts into your own workflow.
4. Make use of variables and external triggers to have Doctor Drafts do the heavy lifting for you.

What are Variables and External Triggers?

Alfred workflows allow for the creation of something called External Triggers. These are special access points that you can use from any workflow in Alfred (as well as externally via AppleScript), to run a flow. Doctor Drafts has a lot of External Triggers available, and you can find out what is available on the External Triggers page in the Documentation section.

Alfred workflows also allow you to store bits of data in workflow variables. These variables can be used to make decisions about what a workflow does and what it does it on. Doctor Drafts uses a variety of variables and in many cases these can be set before calling an External Trigger to instruct Doctor Drafts on what you want it to do.

For any programmers reading this, think of it like using subroutines and global variables.

How Do I Start?

There are two answers to this. First of all, the Documentation section contains information about all of the available External Triggers and the flows that each of them triggers. There is also documentation about each flow, and this documentation includes details about the variables you can (and in some cases must) set-up before calling the External Trigger that will run the flow.

To help you get started with this, we are also providing some examples in this Extended Use section to give you some useful examples which you can tailor, and use as inspiration to build your own solutions.