Can you query Mendeley Desktop with an API?

Question

I would like a script to query my Mendeley Desktop for a list of articles. Is this possible (in any scripting language, including shell)? I know there is an API I could use over http, but I need a local query for when I am not connected to the internet.

Answer 1

No, there's no API for that, I'm afraid.

You'd have to pick apart the local database that Mendeley Desktop uses. But this would be precarious, and would break if Desktop changed its internal database format.

A better option might be for you to run a query against the REST API periodically when you're online (perhaps even automatically), and cache the results so that you have them available when you're offline.

Answer 2

In the local folder there is something called Mendeley Desktop API, which you can see used in the OpenOffice plugin https://github.com/Mendeley/openoffice-plugin/blob/master/src/MendeleyDesktopAPI.py . Open the Mendeley client and open http://localhost:50002/ . I have no idea if using it is supported and how stable the API is, I am just looking around myself.