Laserfiche allows you to modify field and tag information for more than one document at once. This allows you to quickly apply similar settings to several documents or folders without having to open each one up individually.

Modifying Fields for More Than One Entry
To modify field information for more than one document or folder at the same time, select multiple entries and open the Tasks menu. Select View Fields.

If the entries you have selected do not yet have any templates or fields applied to them, you can apply a template or add a field and then fill in any values you want to add. The template you chose will be added to all entries, and any values you typed will be filled in the relevant fields for all of the entries.

For example, you could select four new documents, all by the author John Smith. In the Fields dialog, you could apply the General template, and then type “John Smith” in the Author field. When you click OK, all four documents would have the General template applied to them, with the Author field set to “John Smith.”

If the entries you have selected have the same template applied to them, the Fields dialog will open with that template selected. If a particular field has the same value in all selected entries, that value will be displayed. If a particular field has no value in all selected entries, the field will be displayed as blank. However, if the documents have different values in the same field, the Field dialog will display a “Selected entries have different values assigned” message. If you leave this message intact, you can modify other values in the template without overwriting the different values in that particular field. If you wish to overwrite the different values in that field with a single value for all documents, you can overwrite the message with your own value. When you save, this value will be saved to all documents normally.

For example, you might want to modify two documents, both with the Reports template. This template has three values: Title, Date and Author; each document has a different value in the Title field (”Expense Report” and “Web Statistics”), no date set, and a different value in the Author field (”John Smith” and “John T. Smith”). You might wish to leave the different Titles intact, set the same value for both Date fields, and overwrite the two Author field values with the same single value (”John Smith”) to make searching easier. You would do this by typing a value into the Date field, clearing the “Selected entries have different values assigned” message in the Author field and typing “John Smith,” and leaving the “Selected entries have different values assigned” message intact in the Title field.

If the entries you select have different templates applied, no template will be displayed. Instead, the Template selection box will display a “Multiple templates assigned” message. You can still select a template, which will be applied to all selected entries, but be aware that this will overwrite any existing values in the currently-applied templates.

Modifying Tags for More Than One Entry
To modify tag information for more than one document or folder at the same time, select multiple entries and open the Tasks menu. Select View Tags.

The Tags dialog will display. If the selection box next to a tag is clear, the tag is not currently applied to any of the selected documents; if it contains a check mark, the tag is currently applied to all selected documents; if it contains a green box, the tag is currently applied to one or more selected documents, but not all selected documents. You can clear or select any of the tags to which you have access. Clearing the box will remove the tag from all selected documents, and selecting it will apply the tag to all selected documents.

In the example below, the Informational tag was applied to some of the selected documents but not all; it will not be modified. The Priority tag will be removed from all documents, and the To Be Filed tag will be added to all documents.

Tags: laserfiche 8

Posted on Monday, January 26th, 2009 at 3:42 pm under Support. You can comment on this post.