Hi.
Is there a way to input a value to a “date” custom metadata field for a selection of multiple documents at once ?
Thx.
As far as convenient goes, here’s the best I can do :
Less mouse movement and clicking involved when using the outliner, but I still have to do them one by one.
…And – as opposed to when using the metadata panel of the inspector – I can’t reset the field if there is already a value entered…
This was previously discussed, here.
I see. Thanks, Amber.
So basically, the answer is : it can’t be done.
Unless ,
But that ain’t more convenient than editing them one by one in the outliner, nor than in the metadata panel of the inspector.
No big deal :
Since the idea in my case is to keep track of when a specific operation was done to a document for the last time (in this case, externally fixing the non-break spaces required before ? ! : ; « and » in French), I’ll just make that “date” metadata be of the text format instead (it only needs a single line), and will rather use copy/paste in the outliner.
P.S. I can’t get insert date & time to work with a shortcut. But that is another story. And no big deal either.
Some issues with how much clicking you need to do right now aside, this and Text fields were never meant to be bulk data oriented. So yes, I think at some level, there will always be better ways that involve bypassing the software, for cases where we’re talking hundreds or thousands of fields that need to be updated.
Well, that will of course depend on the individual (in the case of that thread, they were comfortable with XML so it was more convenient for them than what you describe). One of the advantages of human-friendly plain text configuration files is that those inclined toward doing so can get work done faster, and do many more things, than those stuck with whatever the GUI allows them to do, for whatever they need to do. But of course if you have no idea what XML is, and it would take a week or two to feel comfortable messing with it, maybe spending three hours clicking on buttons over and over is preferable.
I’ll just make that “date” metadata be of the text format instead (it only needs a single line), and will rather use copy/paste in the outliner.
Yes that is probably just fine, especially if you use an ISO standard date format that sorts well (YYYY-MM-DD).
And one of those things they are supposed to fix at some point is allowing for conversion of Text fields to Date fields, where if the string in the text field can be recognised as a date/time, it will convert to a Date value. So you wouldn’t be wasting time with that approach either.
I understand that – and it makes perfect sense. But in this situation, it ain’t a question of comfortable with it or not. But rather a “how to affect all of -but only- a set of specific documents ?”
The idea here is that I sync my project with an external folder.
Then I use LibreOffice as a connector to Antidote. (Thanks @steveshank for that neat trick.)
Then, along a few corrections, fix the non break spaces before ? ! : ; « and ».
And finally, when syncing back, I date the documents in the “Updated Documents” collection – so I can have a general idea of how long ago was the operation done in terms of further editing within Scrivener. Thus knowing if it’d be best for me to do it again before handing a printout to someone etc.
(Of course, when done with a draft, I systematically do the operation once more – a thorough correction. But at this editing stage, my priority is efficiency.)
Yeah, if one were going down the path of writing a little script to do this for them, the “Updated Documents” collection would be how you’d keep this function limited to only what should be changed. If you search the .scrivx for <Title>Updated Documents</Title>, you’ll find within that a list of the Binder UUIDs assigned to it, which the script would then use as a list to crawl through and update their metadata settings.
So it would be possible to have something set up that automates what you describe. Collections in general can be useful for using the GUI to create a checklist for a script to run against, for whatever purpose.
Like you say though, it’s a bit much if the alternative is copying and pasting into a text field ten times or so!
By the way, I just converted a metadata from “date” to “text”, and the date converted properly to the new “text” format.
So nothing of what I had previously done is lost. 
