Editing Text Field without Deleting Current Content

replied on October 10, 2016

There isn't a way to do this from the client with multiple entries selected, however you could do it with a simple workflow. Search for the entries you need to change, loop over the results, retrieve the field you want to add to, then assign field values. When you assign the values, just set the value to something like "%(RetrieveValues_YourField) YOUR EXTRA TEXT."

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replied on October 10, 2016 • Show version history

If you want to simulate your preferred method of adding data more closely, you could instead have an extra field called "Append To YourFieldName" that is watched by a workflow.

Alternatively, would allowing multiple values for this field fit your needs?

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replied on October 11, 2016

Hi Scott and Brianna,

My use case is photo tagging - I would use the indexed text values added into a "tags" field. The reason I wouldn't want to use drop-down menus in this case is because the possible list of terms is too large - I couldn't possibly add a value for every event, person, location, etc. that a photo could possibly be linked to. So jumping on the hashtag idea that social media utilizes, I though of creating a generic field with indexed text that's searchable.

Because of this, I suppose I could create a field "add tags" which then alters the original tag field with the workflow suggested. I think this is a better solution than having multiple values for the field as it could cause confusion in the users. Thanks for the combined solution!

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replied on October 21, 2016

So I am creating a template with multiple fields, assuming that this would be the best course of action moving forward; but now have a different issues:

If I have tag "A" in the tag field and have "B" in a second tag field (because it is a multiple value field), when I search, I can only search tags in one field, so even though "A" and "B" are associated with a document, if I search for "A B" in the tag field to search, it doesn't come up because they're in different entries of the same field.

This field is being indexed.

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replied on October 21, 2016

Ah, yes, that is a good point; given your use case, it sounds like your initial implementation would be better after all to allow you to search for multiple tags. Sorry to have lead you astray.

Your users can perform a search that searches for A or B, but it requires use of the search syntax, so I expect that's not an option here.

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replied on October 21, 2016

I think your workflow idea would still work in this case; but unfortunately I haven't used workflow yet. Thanks for your input, it has really helped.

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replied on October 21, 2016

Glad it was still helpful! You may actually be able to implement the same idea using workflow and multi-value fields instead of two separate fields (running a workflow to concatenate the later values to the first value), but I think that would be slightly more challenging.

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Editing Text Field without Deleting Current Content

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