Schulcloud-MCP/docs/NOTES.md

# Your own lesson notes

Schulcloud holds the material and WebUntis holds the schedule. Neither holds
what was actually said in the room — which teacher stressed what, the example
that finally made it click, the aside that turns up in the test. That is in
whatever you write down during the lesson, and until now it lived somewhere no
agent could read.

This is the third source: a directory of Markdown files the server reads,
indexes and searches alongside everything else.

```
NOTES_DIR/
  Deutsch/
    2026-09-15 Erörterung.md
    2026-09-22 Sprachanalyse.md
  LF07/
    2026-09-16 Subnetting.md
  Allgemein/
    2026-09-18 Elternabend.md
```

## Why files

Three properties, in this order:

- **They have to be writable from a classroom.** Whatever you take notes in on a
  phone or a laptop, it can produce text files; nothing can produce rows in the
  Pi's Postgres.
- **They have to be readable when the index is down.** `list_notes` and
  `get_note` read the disk, so they answer before the first crawl and while
  Postgres is unreachable — the index is a view of the notes, never the notes
  themselves. That is the same split as extracted file text and the mirror.
- **They have to survive this project.** A directory of dated Markdown is
  greppable, diffable, syncable and still yours if the server is thrown away.

## What a note looks like

Frontmatter, then the note. Every field is optional, and a plain `.md` file with
no frontmatter at all is a perfectly good note.

```markdown
---
title: Erörterung — Aufbau
date: 2026-09-15
subject: Deutsch
tags: [klausur, aufsatz]
---

Dreischritt: These, Argument mit Beleg, Fazit.

Frau Meier betont: das **Gegenargument** darf nicht fehlen, sonst gibt es
Abzug — kam letztes Jahr in der Arbeit dran.
```

What the server reads out of it:

| Field | Falls back to |
|---|---|
| `title` | the first `# heading`, else the filename without its date |
| `date` | a `YYYY-MM-DD` the **filename** starts with, else nothing |
| `subject` | the first folder name (`Deutsch/…`) |
| `tags` | none |
| `courseId` | none — set it to tie a note to a Schulcloud course in `search` |

`date` also accepts `15.09.2026`, and `fach:` works as a German spelling of
`subject:`. Anything else in the block is kept but not interpreted.

**The file's modification time is never used as the date.** An import writes
every note today; dating a year of lessons "today" would make the whole store
useless for revision, which is most of what it is for.

## Reading them

| Tool | Answers |
|---|---|
| `list_notes` | "what did I write down in Deutsch before the test" — filter by subject or date |
| `get_note` | one note in full, by the path everything else prints |
| `search` | notes by their contents, next to board text and the inside of PDFs |
| `what_changed` | notes that appeared or were edited since a date |

The `pruefungsvorbereitung`, `zusammenfassung` and `tagesvorbereitung` prompts
consult them on their own, and are told to say when a note disagrees with the
uploaded material rather than quietly preferring one.

## Writing them

Four ways in, all landing in the same files:

```bash
# from the command line, text piped in
pbpaste | schulcloud note add --title "Subnetting" --subject LF07

# from an editor, or anything else that writes files
$EDITOR "$NOTES_DIR/LF07/2026-09-16 Subnetting.md"

# by asking Claude, during or after the lesson
#   "halt fest: Gegenargument nicht vergessen, kam letztes Jahr dran"
#   → add_note, subject Deutsch, today's date

# by syncing a folder you already write in — see below
```

`add_note` and `schulcloud note add` take `append`, which adds to the note
already written for that subject and day instead of starting a second one. That
is the right choice while a lesson is running: notes accumulate in one file the
way they do on paper.

**This is the only thing in this server that writes anything.** It writes into
the notes directory and nowhere else: every path component goes through
`safeComponent` and the result through `resolveWithin`, the same two functions
that stop a hostile filename escaping the file mirror, so a note titled
`../../.ssh/authorized_keys` becomes a filename. Schulcloud and WebUntis stay
strictly read-only — see the invariants in `CLAUDE.md`. Set `NOTES_READONLY=1`
to refuse writes entirely, which is right when the notes are synced in from
somewhere else and should have exactly one writer.

## Migrating out of Apple Notes

Notes.app has no export. Its database is a Core Data store whose bodies are
compressed protobuf and whose iCloud copy is encrypted, so scripting the app is
not the clumsy route to your notes — it is the only one.

**On the Mac**, from a checkout of this repo:

```bash
osascript -l JavaScript scripts/export-apple-notes.js > notes.ndjson
```

The first run raises a macOS permission dialog ("Terminal wants access to
Notes"); without it every note comes back empty. `--folder Deutsch` exports one
Notes folder.

Then convert and import. Look at it first:

```bash
schulcloud note import notes.ndjson --dry-run
```

```
would import: 2026-09-15 · Deutsch · Erörterung
would import: 2026-09-16 · LF07 · Subnetting
Would import 84 of 91 note(s), skipped 5 with no text, 2 unreadable in Notes.
```

and then for real, either straight into the server:

```bash
schulcloud note import notes.ndjson
```

or into a local directory, to read through before anything is sent anywhere:

```bash
schulcloud note import notes.ndjson --out ~/Notizen
```

What the import does with each note:

- **The Notes folder becomes the subject** — its last segment, so `Schule/Deutsch`
  is `Deutsch`. Notes' own default folders (`Notizen`, `Recently Deleted`) are
  ignored rather than becoming a subject. `--subject LF07` overrides all of it.
- **The creation date becomes the note's date**, because that is the day of the
  lesson. The modification date is whenever you last tidied it up, which is not
  a school day at all.
- **The HTML becomes Markdown** — headings, lists, checklists, bold, italics and
  links survive; anything else keeps its words and loses its tag.
- **Attachments do not come across.** A note that was a photo of the board
  imports as a line saying an attachment was there. Better than importing empty:
  you can see which notes still need the picture.
- **Locked notes cannot be read at all** and are listed by name at the end.
  Unlock them in Notes and export again.

Re-running the import creates second copies rather than overwriting, since the
importer cannot tell an edited note from a new one with the same title. Import
once, then keep writing in the new place.

## Writing them from a phone, afterwards

The notes are files, so any sync tool will do and the server does not need to
know which. Bind-mount the folder instead of using the volume:

```yaml
# docker-compose.yml, under schulcloud-mcp:
    volumes:
      - /home/pi/Notizen:/data/notes
```

Then point Syncthing, Nextcloud, an Obsidian vault or `git` at
`/home/pi/Notizen` on one side and your phone on the other. New files are picked
up by the next crawl; nothing has to be told about them.

Without any of that, `schulcloud note add` and `add_note` still work — they go
over the same authenticated `/api` as everything else the CLI does.

## What the crawl does with them

A **full** crawl reads the directory and indexes every note: title, subject,
tags and body, under the kind `note`, with its path as its id. A **per-course**
refresh leaves them alone — notes belong to the account, not to a course — and
the store carries the previous generation's rows forward, so a per-course crawl
never looks like the notes were deleted.

Notes are diffed by content, not by modification time, so a sync tool that
rewrites a file byte-for-byte does not show up in `what_changed` as an edit.