Transfer metadata from item to item

[eikek]

From part of the discussion here: https://app.element.io/#/room/#eikek_docspell:gitter.im/$Jhva9EIZEHSM3wFPLoTEpEYqlOOLiS9hAn74qq90wKM

Idea is to allow copying metadata from one item to another.

Relates to #1266

[monnypython]

I thought again about the functionality. Basically, I would find that very helpful to get a certain personal standard. But under the aspect of "linking of documents":

According to the idea, a kind of linking via fields and tags should be created by transferring properties and their information. Without having great programming knowledge, I imagine that it would be relatively complex for the back and front end.
Wouldn't it be "easier" to have real linking of documents?
The advantages I see would be:

• Independence from meta information
• Easier handling of related documents:
  • You don't have to know what content a field has

[eikek]

I also had some thoughts about this and came to a similar result: The metadata is originally thought to "come out" of the document, but there are others of course, like tags that mean some state (waiting, todo etc) and sometimes there is metadata that is simply not in the document. So copying them might still make sense, but it also seems a bit too complex (implementing it as well as the process/use case).

When there is a receipt to an order or a delivery note that doesn't show the some details. I usually go about this by selecting all these "related" documents and using the multi edit tool to add a custom field. Most of the time this is an "order id", or maybe a "process id". This then connects these items and if I find one, I can quickly see all related.

So while I was thinking this, it led me to #528 as well - linking documents without a special meaning. This is almost the same as described above, just that there is no semantic in docspell. You would simply select a few documents and click "Link them". Interesting that we ended up in kind of the same thing :). So totally agree here. I would prefer to do a general linking of documents.

[monnypython]

Glad we agree here :)

To display whether a document has links, you could add another icon with a "link symbol" and perhaps the number of linked documents in the lower bar in the card view next to the "number of pages".
And when you click on it, all linked documents are simply displayed.

But how do you proceed with as few clicks as possible in order to link documents that are far apart in time or that you can only find using the power search (so you don't see different documents to link at first glance)?
One idea would be some kind of clipboard:

• Option on document "add to clipboard" for any desired document
• Open the clipboard
• Select documents
• linkDocuments
  You could link several processes at the same time, for example if you had 10 documents for 2 processes on the clipboard. For example, you select 4 documents for a process, link them and then select the other 6 and link them.

[eikek]

To some extend this is possible right now by searching while in "multi select mode". The selection is saved across searches, so you could search multiple times and add more documents to the selection. However, the selection is reset when you go to a different page. So it would be possible to save the selection across pages and add "select to clipboard" to the item detail.