One thing I like to do with my family is watch movies. But not just any movies, Comic Book movies. We’ve seen both Thor and Thor: The Dark World, Iron Man and Guardians of the Galaxy. It’s not a lot, but we’re working on it.
I’ve mapped out the Marvel Cinematic Universe movies for us to watch, and it’s OK, but there wasn’t a easy way to link into the iTunes store from the list.
I decided that I could probably use Workflow to do this, but I hadn’t really worked with it to do it, but today I had a bit of time and figured, “what they heck … why not?”
My initial attempt was clunky. It required to workflows to accomplish what I needed. This was because I had to split the work of Workflow into 2 workflows:
- Get the Name
- Get the Link
Turns out there’s a much easier way, so I’ll post the link to that workflow, and not the workflows that are much harder to use!
The workflow Add Movie to Watch accepts iTunes products. The workflow then does the following:
- It saves the
iTunes productsURL as a variable callediTunes - It then gets the
iTunesvariable to retrieve theNameand sets the value to a variable calledMovie - Next it asks ‘Who is the movie being added by?’ This is important for my family as we want a common list, but it’s also good to know who added the movie!
- This value is saved to a variable called
User - Finally, I want to know when the movie was added so I get the current date.
We take all of the items and construct a bit of text that looks like this:
[{Movie}]({iTunes}) - Added on {Input} by {User}
Where each of the words above surrounded by the {} are the variable names previously mentioned ({Input} is from the get current date and doesn’t need to be saved to a variable).
In my last step I take this text and append it to a file in Dropbox called Movies to Watch.md.
It took way longer than I would have liked to finish this up, but at the end of the day, I’m glad that I was able to get it done.