Create or Append Daily Journal

Hello! I’m trying to do something that I think is simple, but it’s not working, so it’s probably not.

I would like an action that takes the draft, creates a new text file, in Dropbox or iCloud Drive, that is titled with today’s day, but if that file already exists, I want the draft contents to append to the existing file.

Is that possible? Seems like it was years ago.

Take a look at the Action “Monthly Journal” I think it does exactly what you want. Been using it for several months now.

That’s what I started with. It created the file but gives me an error every time I try to use the action to append to that file.

As @Denrael mentioned, there are sample actions for monthly journals to the different services: Dropbox Journal action, iCloud Drive Journal action.

These do what you are asking for, except grouping by month, not day. To adjust these to write to journals that rollover by day, you would need to edit the template tag in the file name field of the action’s step. Instead of Journal-[[date|%Y-%m]].txt, you might want Journal-[[date|%Y-%m-%d]].txt. For details on modifying date format tags, take a look at the date section of the Using Templates article.

That’s what I did. Or tried to do. I posted the Dropbox action above your reply…because I can’t think of anything that is wrong with it but there might be some kind of technicality that I don’t know about.

That looks right…what happens when you run it?

It gives me an error notification and I feel bad.

Well, the first time I run it, it creates the file and everything seems to work well.

The second time i run it, to append something to the file that it created, it throws the error.

What version of Drafts? There was a Dropbox bug due to changes in their API that could cause that problem, but it is fixed in the current version of Drafts.

If you are up-to-date, what is the error detail in the action log?

I just realized that I’m off the beta and I guess the beta version was old. The App Store version seems to be working. Sorry. :skull_and_crossbones:

No worries. Cleared out the TestFlight to reset for coming iOS 14 betas next month. If you get back on the beta train, be sure to join the Slack (details will be posted with beta info) - that’s where beta-related announcements are posted.