Looking for ideas for Data Jar. What do you store in it?
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Definitely following. At a loss for ideas.
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Out of curiosity, are you looking for additional ideas? What do you store in it currently? Or is this using an app, while in search for the purpose of that app?
Data Jar has been mentioned on several recent episodes of Automators - including the episode with @HeyScottyJ!
One recent top level item I’ve added is favourite locations for my driving shortcut (like a SatNav). I don’t want these in my contacts necessarily - so I store them in Data Jar, add icons, and then present them as a nice menu using Toolbox Pro.
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In that case you don’t need the app, imho.
Some examples I’ve got in my Data Jar
- API keys
- Wifi network names + locations to quickly resolve my location for certain shortcuts (traffic/weather)
- ingredients for recipes (per nr. of people)
- screenshots
- football team nrs for football-data.org
basically anything permanent, or that I need to retrieve elsewhere / in multiple shortcuts goes into data jar.
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What @JKoopmans said 
My most recent use case is I have a number of reference lists that I routinely capture to and review:
- gift ideas
- books to read
- movies/music/media to consume
- things I might want to buy for myself
I keep the lists in Agenda, but I have a pairing of note and note identifiers in Data Jar so that Shortcuts can easily present me list choices to look at or append to.
I have also done this with Slack channels (name and identifiers) to make Shortcuts more easily integrate with it, and as @RosemaryOrchard mentioned, I got to talk about how I have stores for team member attributes (name, email address, pronoun, and more) on Automators 49.
Cheers,
ScottyJ
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I do something similar for apple notes, I keep a #tagnr in Data Jar for Apple notes I’ve created. Each note contains a random #tagnr. that I use to search the notes DB and retrieve the note from Shortcuts.
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- Credentials & API keys
- Constants shared by multiple Shortcuts (currently mainly dates)
So far I’m only reading data from Data Jar (in Shortcuts), so also following this topic!
Is there a faster way to get data in besides using Shortcuts? Any way to directly import json?
Of course I listen to every episode of Automators 
The driving locations is a great idea.
I was thinking about using it to save my parked car location. I’m always paranoid Siri will forget, so I save it in a Draft.
I recently grabbed a gadget that looks like a replacement for the Automatic that does that for me. I’ve not tested it much though so am not yet willing to link or recommend it!
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There are a couple of images I use frequently for reference (formula sheets, paper schedules, …) I added them to Data Jar where it’s easy to grab by key and then show in Quick Look. It seems like there should be a direct way to do this in Shortcuts, but I haven’t been able to link to a specific image.
@RosemaryOrchard is there a way to use “Other Networks” for the fast WiFi name to location lookup? There are several places I got to, but don’t connect to the network (example, can’t connect to work wifi with a personal device).
Nope, there’s no way to see those in Shortcuts - which is a shame!
I started using Data Jar about the same time I listened to the daily brief podcast episode. I found it very helpful when trying to convert dates to proper English names. For example, I used it to calculate what day of the season (3rd day of Spring etc) it is by storing the dates to use against the current date.
Anyone know a solution here?
I haven’t found a way.
Data Jar photos are visible in iCLoud Drive, but not the JSON.
I asked the developer if it was possible to access Data Jar from Scriptable or Drafts and he said no.
I suppose one could make a generic shortcut to set keys and feed that from a csv.
Do you have an example of this shortcut? My office recently moved to a new building and I have several shortcuts which need the new address. I am thinking of using Data Jar but not sure how to get the address from Data Jar to use for driving directions.
Thanks!
The no bells and whistles set-up would be along the lines of:
with Data Jar having a Dictionary named SatNav and the items in the dictionary being of type Text similar to:
In the Shortcut, the Get keys action returns the list of items in the Data Jar dictionary, in this case the names given to the locations. The Choose from presents the list of keys (location names) and the Get value then gets the address from the text field for the chosen location. The address is then passed to the Apple Maps Get directions action (you can select other map apps and direction types - walk etc).
If your Shortcut does not need the selection option as it will always use the same destination, for example Apple HQ in the above Data Jar, you can simply use:
Hope this helps.
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