From the GUI to Automation

A common pattern: use the GUI to get an extraction working interactively - picking the right extractor and writer, filling in properties, confirming Extract actually succeeds against your real server - then reuse that exact configuration unattended (a scheduled task, a script, a CI job) without re-entering the same properties every time.

Once Extract finishes successfully, its results dialog has an Automate this Extraction…​ button: it prompts for where to save the configuration (the same as File > Save Configuration…​), then shows the exact command that reruns it, with a Copy to Clipboard button - ready to paste into a script or scheduled task. It’s disabled after a failed run on purpose: there’s nothing useful to automate about a configuration that doesn’t actually work yet.

The same thing done by hand:

  1. In the GUI, configure your extractor and writer and click Extract to confirm it works.

  2. File > Save Configuration…​ writes those exact settings to a JSON file.

  3. Point the CLI at that file wherever the extraction should actually run:

    ./outline-extractor-cli.sh extract --config nightly-extract.ngoe.json

The CLI reads the identical JSON the GUI wrote, so anything confirmed working in the GUI runs exactly the same way from a script or a scheduled task - no flags to reconstruct by hand. If you installed the macOS app, both the button and the manual command above already point at its bundled cli launcher automatically (see the earlier NOTE under Requirements and launching) - there’s nothing to adjust.

If you installed the macOS app rather than the zip distribution, there’s no outline-extractor-cli.sh on disk - the CLI is a second executable bundled inside the app itself:

"/Applications/Next Generation Outline Extractor.app/Contents/MacOS/cli" \
  extract --config nightly-extract.ngoe.json

Same subcommands, same JSON format as the zip distribution’s CLI - just a different, longer path to invoke it from (quote it, since it contains spaces).

The Windows .msi bundles the same second executable, named cli.exe, sitting right alongside the main app in its install directory - by default:

"C:\Program Files\Next Generation Outline Extractor\cli.exe" ^
  extract --config nightly-extract.ngoe.json

(The exact path depends on where you chose to install during setup - the installer lets you pick a different directory.)

On Windows, Automate this Extraction…​ doesn’t yet know to look for this bundled cli.exe - it currently reports the CLI as unavailable there. Use the manual invocation above until that’s fixed.