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HOWTO: Create a Bulk Edit Form Using Nuxeo Studio

Updated: December 17, 2024

In this tutorial you will learn how to create a form to edit metadata on a large set of documents.

Requirements

This capability is available since LTS 2021 with Web UI 3.0.9.

  • A Contract document type created in Nuxeo Modeler.
  • The Nuxeo Web UI addon installed on your instance.
  • In Studio Modeler > Settings > Application Definition, make sure that Nuxeo Web UI is in the Packages to Install list.
  • Activate the Select All and Bulk Actions feature by adding the nuxeo.selection.selectAllEnabled=true property in your nuxeo.conf file.

Bulk edit can work without enabling the select all option if you intend to select documents to edit individually or using a range only.

Create the Structure

  1. In Studio Designer, click on the RESOURCES tab.
  2. Select the UI folder and click on the create button at the bottom of the screen.
  3. Create a new folder and name it bulk.

Create a Bulk Edit Layout

To make things faster, we will reuse the same form as the one used for the edit layout of the Contract document type.

  1. From the RESOURCES tab, open the document > contract folder and open the nuxeo-contract-edit-layout.html file.
  2. Copy the content of the layout (Ctrl/Cmd + A then Ctrl/Cmd + C).
  3. Select the bulk folder you created previously and click on the create button at the bottom of the screen.
  4. Create a new empty file and name it nuxeo-bulk-edit-contracts-layout.html.
  5. Inside, paste the content of the contract edit layout.
  6. In your bulk edit layout, replace the name of the layout you copied (nuxeo-contract-edit-layout) with the current one (nuxeo-bulk-edit-contracts-layout).
  7. Save your configuration.

Your bulk edit layouts need to be placed in the dedicated bulk folder, and follow a naming convention introduced to prevent collision. Make sure they are always named nuxeo-bulk-[your-layout-name]-layout.

Bind the Bulk Edit Layout to a Button

Now that your layout is ready, you will need to bind it to a button.

  1. From the RESOURCES tab, open the nuxeo-[studio-project-id]-custom-bundle.html file.

    If the file doesn't exist yet, open the nuxeo-[studio-project-id]-bundle.html file first and you will be prompted for the custom bundle file to be generated.

  2. Inside the file, add the following contribution to bind your layout to a button:

    <!-- Contribution for bulk editing contracts in every context (no filtering) -->
<nuxeo-slot-content name="bulkEditContractsButton" slot="RESULTS_SELECTION_ACTIONS" order="1">
 <template>
   <nuxeo-edit-documents-button icon="nuxeo:edit" label="Bulk Edit Contracts" documents="[[selection]]" layout="edit-contracts"></nuxeo-edit-documents-button>
 </template>
</nuxeo-slot-content>

    In this example, we are displaying our button in every situation. Feel free to add filters to this contribution to refine when the button should be displayed.

  3. Save your configuration. Your bulk edit form is ready to be used.

You only need to mention the unique part of the layout name in the layout property of the nuxeo-edit-documents-button element. It applies the naming convention automatically.

Testing the Result

From any Folderish document (e.g. a Folder, a Workspace) or in the results of a search, select one or several documents you want to validate. Click on your brand new button in the toolbar on top of the screen to open your bulk edit form. Select the properties to replace and the value to set, and click save to launch the action.

Questions and Answers

How Does Bulk Edit Deal With Required Fields?

When a field is marked as required, it won't be shown as required in your custom form because users can still choose to leave the existing value(s) as they are. However, the empty value(s) option will be grayed out to prevent any error.

Known Limitations

Support for One Repository at a Time

Bulk actions are compatible with documents located inside a single repository at a time at this stage.

  • Using the select all functionality and triggering a bulk action will result in this action being applied only on documents located in the current repository.
  • Manually selecting a range and triggering a bulk action will result in a visible error.

No Support for Layout Blocks / Limited Compatibility With Custom Elements

When using bulk edit, Web UI tries to detect the input widget in order to show the bulk edit options dynamically.

At this stage, we are not able to make this work when the input element is embedded into another element; be it a layout block or a custom element.

No Support for Bulk Editing Document Tags

Document tags leverage an element that has a specific behavior. We cannot make it compatible with bulk editing at this stage.