Using EF as a notes database - any guides or suggestions?

I’m a heavy user of EF, but I’ve been looking at supplemental programs to help with taking and organizing notes from my documents. It’s probably easier to figure out how to adapt EF for this, than to try to integrate it with a new application. I already use OmniOutliner Pro heavily; 2 major apps is enough, and I have to add a 3rd one for citations anyway. Plus MS Windows to actually write in.

It seems like EF has enough power to make this almost possible.
Tags with hierarchy; flags; folders with hierarchy; very fast searching; magic folders; finder integration; what else?

I want to

  1. assign keywords to documents. I could use tags, or create my own #tags in the notes sections.
  2. Take all the documents that fit criteria, and *re-organize their sequence. * Preferably in some kind of outline. I don’t know any way to do this except use the “From” field, which I use for other purposes, and even then it is not very flexible.
    Create very temporary collections of documents e.g. “use these in Chapter 5.” I could create a tag for each one, but it would be easier to manage a drag-and-drop method. Drag and dropping into a new folder destroys the existing organization of folders, which I can’t afford.
  3. Create quick notes that point to specific documents, but can be manipulated independently.
  4. Have specific field types, such as Location, Year, Airline, Crash_Type. Then select and sort on those fields.
  5. visually move items around in a field to show relationships. Maybe by opening the Finder window??

OmniOutliner is good for creating temporary organizations of items, and I use it heavily to take notes. (I wish there were EF toolbar items for “copy URL” and “copy record line”) But OO is not so good for searching and organizing those notes, AFAI can tell.

EF does not intend to be a general purpose database, but it’s close enough that I wonder if anyone has figured out how to stretch it? Clay Moore has a few notes along these lines. http://clayssite.com/2009/12/18/how-to-use-eaglefiler-stationery-to-make-a-database/
I’m sure I’ll be wondering this a year from now, so post suggestions any time.
Thanks

It seems like there’s a lot less of a distance for OmniOutliner to get to what you want than for EagleFiler to. I search in OmniOutliner a lot, and it works very well in my experience; I’m not sure what deficiencies you’re referring to.

If you paste the results of “Copy Record Link” while editing text then you get links which don’t get preserved when you save your document. If you paste the results while editing structure then you just get raw URLs. However, if you drag files from EagleFiler into OmniOutliner, then you get one link per outline item which should be quite amenable to your reordering, tagging, etc.