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Orestes Sanchez
Dec 9, 2019, 4:53:52 PM12/9/19
to AtoM Users
Hi,
Is there any way to select and apply an action to a bunch of elements in AtoM?
For example, selecting elements and putting them on the clipboard, then choosing an action like "Delete" (a confirm popup will appear) and then delete the elements.
Or an action like "Set field" to setup the value of a field on all the selected elements.
Orestes.
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Dan Gillean
Dec 10, 2019, 11:24:40 AM12/10/19
to ICA-AtoM Users
Hi Orestes,
Unfortunately, not at this time - though this is definitely the kind of feature we would love to see added to AtoM in the future, thus far no one has sponsored it for development. As you may know, we rely on community support for feature development, either via development sponsorship, or community code contributions. To learn more about how we maintain and develop the AtoM project, see:
I agree with you that the Clipboard would be a great way to manage bulk actions, such as bulk deletions, bulk move operations, bulk publication status updates, and more. We would want to add job scheduler support for this as well, so long running operations do not time out in the web browser. If your institution might be interested in sponsoring such a feature, please feel free to contact me off-list.
There are a number of other possible enhancements to support bulk actions as well. For example, in ICA-AtoM we briefly had a Global search and replace module, which you can still read about on the old ICA-AtoM wiki here:
This feature performed its updates synchronously on demand via the browser, which unfortunately meant it was very prone to timeouts and could cause data corruption if the operation timed out mid-update. For this reason, we chose to remove the feature in version 2.0, until we can find a sponsor to redesign it and add job scheduler support. We have a Wishlist ticket for this here in our issue tracker:
You also mentioned the ability to bulk edit fields. I think it could be possible to take ideas from how Windows handles bulk edits to the metadata of numerous diverse files - when the values of a specific field are the same across all selections, it is shown in the field and directly editable. Where they are different, it says (multiple values) - but a user can click into the field and update it to apply a single value across all selections. Where there are no values in any of the records, the field is blank - but again, users can populate the field to update all records at once for this field. Where values can't be edited (such as the length of music tracks for example, which is calculated based on the number of tracks selected in the value below, and therefore not a user-editable piece of metadata), the field simply doesn't turn into an edit field when clicked. An example:
If I put my cursor into the # field and added the value of 1, then when I click "Apply", all the selected songs would then be updated to be listed as track 1, even though they currently all have different values. All these songs have the same contributing artist listed (Arthur Russel), but again, I could change this globally for the selected songs by clicking into the field and editing it.
I could imagine a similar workflow in AtoM where a user can:
- Add selections to the clipboard
- Click a bulk edit option on the clipboard
- An edit template (based on the default edit template used in the settings) would open, following a similar pattern to the Windows example above
- The user makes edits as needed, and then clicks save
- This triggers an update to be handled by the job scheduler for the selected records.
Additionally, there is still much we could do to improve the ability to use the CSV import as an update to existing records. I have previously explained the history of the current functionality and why it doesn't work well for roundtripping updates in a single system in this forum thread. In the upcoming 2.6 release, our team has managed to add a new command-line --roundtrip option that will implement some of the matching enhancements described in this ticket, but we still don't have support for this in the user interface - and as the documentation notes, there are still some fields that cannot be updated via CSV import at this time.
In the meantime, there are some command-line tasks that can be used for some bulk actions, and you can also potentially use SQL to perform bulk edits - we have previously shared a number of SQL queries and simple scripts in the forum to help users solve problems. A few examples:
- Adding the same default content to every record in a specific field: https://groups.google.com/d/msg/ica-atom-users/QyI6qL8LZ-U/rtH8HLDtAgAJ
- Publishing all draft descriptions: https://groups.google.com/d/msg/ica-atom-users/yl5SbSoIPrM/zfrwFkoOCgAJ
- Updating all authority record slugs: https://groups.google.com/d/msg/ica-atom-users/OTlW3iz8kRE/fMVgEvdtBgAJ
- Deleting all accidental blank descriptions: https://groups.google.com/d/msg/ica-atom-users/KJKSAvFm15I/QcxXNEAWAAAJ
- Changing the event type of a date: https://groups.google.com/d/msg/ica-atom-users/nBg-7mffTOk/u0Gfmo9zBwAJ
Regards,
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Orestes Sanchez
Dec 12, 2019, 11:18:39 AM12/12/19
to ica-ato...@googlegroups.com
Thank you for your reply!
There is a lot of detail in it, so I will need some time to think about it.
My organisation is a volunteer association and we don't have enough resources for development, I am the only one on development and I do it as a volunteer.
Regards
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