Comment/discussion IDs retained when copying between editors

[Sammaiah-Jai]

Comment/discussion IDs retained when copying between editors

Hey !

I'm using PlateJS comments/discussions and noticed that when content containing comments is copied from one Slate/Plate document and pasted into another, the original commentId / discussionId references are retained.

As a result, resolving the copied comment in the new document also resolves the original comment in the source document.

Expected: When copying between independent documents, source-specific comment/discussion references should either be removed or remapped to new IDs.

Is there an official/recommended way in Plate to strip or remap comment/discussion metadata during copy/paste? Is there an existing issue or implementation for this?

Thanks!

[mohammadrezwankhan]

This happens because Plate/Slate's clipboard payload is a serialized fragment, not a document-aware copy operation. Plate stores a comment reference on text leaves as comment_<id> (source); the generic application/x-slate-fragment path copies those properties unchanged. It has no source/destination document identity and does not carry your TDiscussion store, so it cannot safely decide whether to preserve or remap the ID.

For independent documents, the safest default is to strip the source references before insertion. Plate v53 exposes a parser.transformFragment hook after the Slate fragment is decoded and before insertFragment (pipeline):

import {
  createSlatePlugin,
  TextApi,
  type Descendant,
} from 'platejs';

const isCommentRef = (key: string) =>
  key === 'comment' ||
  key === 'commentId' ||
  key === 'discussionId' ||
  key === 'commentTransient' ||
  key.startsWith('comment_');

const stripCommentRefs = (fragment: Descendant[]): Descendant[] => {
  const visit = (node: Descendant): Descendant => {
    const clean = Object.fromEntries(
      Object.entries(node).filter(([key]) => !isCommentRef(key))
    ) as any;

    if (!TextApi.isText(node)) {
      clean.children = node.children.map(visit);
    }
    return clean;
  };

  return fragment.map(visit);
};

export const StripCrossDocumentCommentsPlugin = createSlatePlugin({
  key: 'strip-cross-document-comments',
  editOnly: true,
  inject: {
    plugins: {
      ast: {
        parser: {
          transformFragment: ({ fragment }) => stripCommentRefs(fragment),
        },
      },
    },
  },
});

Add that plugin to the destination editor's plugin list. It preserves text, elements, and unrelated marks, but removes Plate's comment, comment_draft/comment_<id>, and commentTransient properties plus the custom commentId/discussionId names from your example.

Test this through editor.tf.insertData with an application/x-slate-fragment payload, not only by calling the helper: assert the pasted nested fragment has no source comment keys while bold/links/structure remain unchanged.

If same-document copies should preserve comments, add an application-owned document UUID in a custom MIME payload and run the strip only when source UUID differs. To remap instead, that payload must also carry or reference the source discussion records; generate one old→new ID map, rewrite every comment_<old> mark, and atomically clone each discussion's id and every comment's discussionId. Remapping only the Slate mark—or only the discussion store—leaves broken/cross-linked state, so stripping is preferable when the standard fragment is all you have.

[Sammaiah-Jai]

@mohammadrezwankhan

Thanks for the detailed explanation and for right direction!

I’ll try this out and get back to you with the results..