I have a different question relating to the File Attachments field. I need to attach about 1000 PDF files (110GB) to a similar number of records in my 2500 citation database. I expect the number of PDF files to more than double over the next few months. I expect that in time, as the number of files and GB of storage increases, they will need to be relocated. For mechanical reasons I don’t want to put all of these files in a single folder (the “relative path”). Eventually having to manually change each of 2000+ “absolute” pointers one at a time is not an appealing prospect either.
Does anyone know of a workaround? (Now or in the works for the near future?) The easiest solution I can think of would be to batch replace one substring eg. “F:/” with another, eg. “G:/” for a subset of citations, eg. “Authors > M”. I understand substring replacement is not possible at present.
Anothr related question: Is it possible to make the “File attachment” field display the path/filename (or at least the complete file name) rather than an icon and fragment of the filename?
You should also note that you can always ask endnote to move absolute links to reletive links, where it will collect and copy all the pdfs to the PDF folder. So you could stick with the absolute locations, and if necessary move them all to one place. Unfortunately I don’t think it has the facility to do the reverse. A suggestion to the developers perhaps?
As mentioned by Leanne, I explained what I do with URL field in that thread.
I don’t think Attachment field can be modified in the way you think, but URL field accepts file path as well.
One additional note about URL is, you can use ctrl+G to open the linked file, but you can’t open multiple files at the same time. If you have multiple lines in the URL field, you need to click on them one by one.
In any case, are you going to attach 1000 PDF files one by one? How these files are named?
As I explained in the other thread, I save PDF files with my unique ID number (pubmed ID), which is available in Endnote’s entry as well. This makes “independent” link between PDF files saved in separate location and each entry in the Endnote. If your PDF files are named, like author, title, theme, etc, you would not be able to automate the link.