5 out of 5 iOS shortcuts (aka Workflow) not working or flawed as supposed/indicated/expected!

[X-man 2]

Evernote‘s shortcuts support offers 5 services of which almost each is flawed, rendering the integration unreliable and hence useless: 

• Operations on existing notes should not search by „Note Title“ only but allow to work on „Evernote note“ objects and to search for evernote links (internal/external from the „Get Note Link“ service) as well as date ranges (created / updated). notebooks and optionally content of the notes body to contain „any“ or „some“ of keywords provided. Such search operations should allow/opt to first (and maybe exclusively) look into the local storage (and especially into offline workbooks) rather than requesting the server backends (as I assume that a user might want to work on the same items he‘s been working on locally anyways). 
• Operations returning a „Evernote Note“ object (or multiple) should make the following additional properties of such objects available:
  • internal/external link (as URL),
  • notebook (as text) 
  • body (as html)
• Create New Note: Parameter „in Notebook“ is ignored.
  New notes are created in the „default“ notebook only. After creating a Note (even on a workbook which is made available offline) it takes more than 15 seconds for the note to be available for „Get Notes“ and „Append to Evernote“. This timeout might take much longer. 
• Append to Evernote: Parameter „Note Title“ returns no result for newly created notes unless the note has been created at least 15 seconds before. Parameter  „in Notebook“ is ignored.
• Get Notes: Parameter „in Notebook“ is ignored. 
• Delete Notes: I do not dare to test that function! 
• Privacy Settings: When using different operations (Create, Append, Get, Delete) there appear multiple privacy settings all stating Allow this shortcut to access „Evernote“. Also only some of them bear the evernote icon (elephant) as some other are a white sphere on blue background. (I assume this is related to the fact that the service are provided in different extensions) 

When will at least the Create and Append Issues be fixed?
I‘m suffering from those errors for quite some time.
Hope to hear from Evernote soon!

[PinkElephant 8,244]

OK, will play with them a little. I use just one on a regular basis, the one to send a website into a EN note (instead of the sharing function). This works in most cases, on a few websites it doesn‘t. But often these are websites that don‘t support reader mode either, so it is probably a technical issue with the website.

In general, to reach out to EN and to hear from them you need to issue a support ticket. I would rather issue one for each shortcut, because it makes following up easier. The forum can produce answers from other users, but that is it.

[X-man 2]

6 hours ago, PinkElephant said:

OK, will play with them a little. I use just one on a regular basis, the one to send a website into a EN note (instead of the sharing function). This works in most cases, on a few websites it doesn‘t. But often these are websites that don‘t support reader mode either, so it is probably a technical issue with the website.

In general, to reach out to EN and to hear from them you need to issue a support ticket. I would rather issue one for each shortcut, because it makes following up easier. The forum can produce answers from other users, but that is it.

Thank you @PinkElephant for the hint. I opened two support request with EN Support, one for the „Create New Note“ and one for „Append to Evernote“. 

After testing a bit more thoroughly I also realized that both create and append do not handle rich text well:
hyperlinks get killed which is totally unacceptable in my use-case. I‘ll keep all of you posted on the responses by EN. 

KR - C

[PinkElephant 8,244]

On looking into it a bit deeper, my impression is the shortcuts predate the release of v10. I have the impression they do not work seamlessly with the current version of EN, which is an app embedded into a framework. Some work most of the time, like clipping an article in reader view, others don‘t. 

[X-man 2]

1 hour ago, PinkElephant said:

On looking into it a bit deeper, my impression is the shortcuts predate the release of v10. I have the impression they do not work seamlessly with the current version of EN, which is an app embedded into a framework. Some work most of the time, like clipping an article in reader view, others don‘t. 

Interesting analysis: As I currently am developing a small app with intents I've a technical interest in this beyond my user-related problems with my main use-case*): 
So you're saying the shortcuts are supported by an older part (extension) of the app which was build before the rebuild app 10 was released? So using the older version (wherever to get that) you think would help?

*) my use case is mainly to collect various parts of a website if I find an interesting section to be quoted /remembered (instead of storing the whole page):  I like only selected citations from websites including an optional comment and the url to be remembered... 
I am actually looking into "DRAFTS" to do so in the near future. 

[PinkElephant 8,244]

No, I think the shortcuts app has problems to access the „core“ EN app, since it is embedded into the framework that communicates with the operating system. The app AFAIK is basically the same for iOS and Android, all interaction with the OS level of the device is handled by the framework. This spares EN to change code every time the OS is modified.

But it makes it more difficult to cut through the framework and reach the app. If you look at the shortcuts side, it calls the app directly, not through the API server interface. I think this is the tricky part, because EN needs to understand for what the shortcut is asking, and needs to deliver that information. So it needs to pass twice through the intermediate layer of the framework.

[X-man 2]

Thank you for these interesting insights. So we'll have to wait for them to fix this... 

I was actually thinking about to write a simple app with webkit integrating with the documented Web-API
When I look at AppStore and App installed on my device how could I distinguish between shortcut, framework and app itself? Is there a developer's view on this which I am missing? Any tools I should know of? 

[PinkElephant 8,244]

No idea - I am no developer. Just took a look at the code, which is Pidgin level programming.

Maybe another person could kick in at this point.

[VaNTa 2]

Over a year ago and it's still broken/misleading 😕

[PinkElephant 8,244]

The v10 apps are not supporting scripting. I think it is a design restriction, and nothing on a list to be „fixed“.

[VaNTa 2]

1 hour ago, PinkElephant said:

The v10 apps are not supporting scripting. I think it is a design restriction, and nothing on a list to be „fixed“.

Of course there is something to be fixed - the possibility to choose the notebook as it's not misleading and not working as designed (and used to work).

[VaNTa 2]

2 hours ago, PinkElephant said:

The v10 apps are not supporting scripting. I think it is a design restriction, and nothing on a list to be „fixed“.

One more thing:

As described here: https://www.reddit.com/r/Evernote/comments/qtkzaa/shortcut_problem_since_ios_151/ this feature still works, but for whatever reason it requires some workaround. I have just tested it and it really works with latest EN on the iOS. So there is something to be fixed as the EN itself allows to create notes in dedicated notebook.