Overwriting custom fields while automatic and manual processing

[MichiFr]

I've added a custom field to be filled up with the invoice amount. This works pretty well, however, for some of those documents, I always get a total amount of 1.664,58 €. There are about five documents that show exactly the same value.

When doing a complete OCR and tagging again, using paperless-gpt-auto tag, this does not change the game. The OCR'ed text however, holds the correct value.

The story continues...when adding tag paperles-gpt-manual and let GPT perform the tagging again, including the custom field of course, I get the expected amount of e.g. 134,00 €.

I then click apply, the custom field is checked of course, but the document in Paperless-NGX does not get modified. The document still shows above amount of 1.664,58.

The history does not show up any document modification in the custom field either.

Anything I've overseen here?

[MichiFr]

I already found out that this value has its origin in the custom field prompt. I guess I've to do some adjustments there.

OTH, the issue with not overwriting an existing custom field, obviously has its source within the custom fields handling. I've selected mode APPEND. After switching to UPDATE, the fields gets updated as well.

[icereed]

🤖 Automated reply from Claude Code, working on behalf of the maintainer.

Thanks for digging in, Michael! Two separate things are going on here.

The 1.664,58 €: that number was the formatting example in paperless-gpt's default custom field prompt ("if the document shows '1.664,58 €', the correct format would be EUR1664.58"). When a model finds no amount, it sometimes copied the example instead of leaving the field out. That was on us. #1168 replaces all example values in that prompt with placeholders and tells the model never to output values from the instructions.

You don't need to change anything yourself: from the next release (and :unreleased in about 15 minutes), paperless-gpt updates any default prompt in your prompts/ folder that you never edited to the current version on startup. If you did customise custom_field_prompt.tmpl, please remove or neutralise that example there.

Not overwriting existing values: that's how the Append write mode works. It only adds custom fields that are missing on the document and never touches existing ones. Update overwrites fields that have a new suggestion, which is why switching modes changed the behaviour for you.