forums.tropy.org

Highlighting Within Metadata and Editing Multiple Items

#1

First, on Tropy 1.8.2 it is no longer possible to highlight a portion of text within metadata (for copying and pasting, for example). Instead, when I click and drag it always assumes I want to drag the whole item somewhere. It did not used to behave this way before.

Secondly, when I highlight multiple items, it is no longer possible to change a metadata field to a single value if they have two different values. For example, I want to change the date of multiple documents. One is listed as “1974-04-01” and another is just “1974-04”. If I highlight both items (or more), it says “Apr 1, 1976 +”. I used to be able to press the return key to change all to “1974-04-01”, but now pressing return does nothing. Please revert back to the original behavior, which made it easy to change multiple items to the same value.

#2

Moving (or copying if you hold Alt) fields is a relatively new feature. It allows you to copy or move values from one field to another: this is way more powerful than selecting the text and copy/pasting it to another field, especially when you select multiple items: this allows you, for example to copy or move the ‘title’ value of all selected items to any other field. Note that this is not possible with normal copy/paste, because there you would replace the value of all items with the pasted text (i.e., it’s not possible to move/copy disparate values). You can still use normal copy paste (e.g. if you want to copy just a partial value) but you need to click into the field once to activate it: then you can select the text as usual.

Overwriting disparate values should still be possible, so that’s definitely an unintended regression. We’ll fix right away. In the meantime, there’s a silly workaround: you can either select the item with the value that should change first (i.e., so that the ‘1974-04’ value is visible, then change that to ‘1974-04-01’) or by changing the value twice (i.e., if ‘1974-04-01’ is already visible, just make a change like ‘1974-04-01x’ and then remove the change again). Currently, the change is not saved on enter because the visible value did not change, but this will be addressed. Thanks for reporting!