Use the Bulk CSV tool to add Artefacts to Groups in bulk

The Bulk CSV tool is widely celebrated as the most effective and flexible bulk artefact manipulation available in RedEyeDMS. It allows up to Bucket wide bulk updates to disparate metadata, and version file uploads to smaller sets of data in one tool. Where the My Collection is a great resource for bulk actions sometimes you need just a little more scale. What is hidden in plain sight, and less understood, is the extremely powerful Add Group function of the Bulk CSV tool.

What's in this article:

Where to find the Tool

Feature Options Explained

• STAGE 1 - What would you like to group?

• STAGE 2 - What Type?

• STAGE 3 - Select Group and action

Usage Scenarios

Specific Task Use Case - Create a Bulk CSV ONLY for the purpose of moving artefacts to a Group

Role Required:
Bucket Administrator
Bulk CSV User (Must have Group Admin role in the target group)

Caveats:

Target Group must be created and available prior to attempting to Add Group with Bulk CSV

Where to find the Tool

The Add Group function appears in a Bulk CSV report only AFTER the first import of the Edited CSV completes. It is then available for all other phases. It is located next to the Download Original menu.

Feature Options Explained

While the Add Group tool becomes available after first import completion, and prior to execution, some options can and should be used prior to execution, and some only after execution. Please note [Post] or [Prior] to execution qualifications in the descriptions below.

When you click the Add Group button, the tool works in three stages:

1. What would you like to group? then, contextually based on this selection,
2. What Type? then,
3. Select Group and action the Add group

STAGE 1 - What would you like to group?

Artefacts - Some or all of the artefacts referenced in the report [Prior/Post], or

Issues - Artefacts that are reported as having an issue of some kind [Prior], or

Placeholders - New artefacts created as Placeholders [Post] Execution so that artefacts have been first created) 

STAGE 2 - What Type?

Artefacts

• Pending - Only entries that have been identified with changes Pre Execution [Prior]
• Updated - Only entries that have had changes applied Post Execution [Post]
• All of them - All artefacts in the import CSV [Post - except for Specific Task Use Case]

Issues

• Critical Issues - Critical Issues in red will fail to update on execution. If you have a large CSV and you have critical issues, you may elect to group the affected artefacts to be easily found for later correction, and then execute the report so that the other valid artefacts get updated.
• Missing Essential - You may elect to group artefacts missing Essential metadata into a group for easy identification for updating later. These will still process on execution as essential warning is only advisory
• All of them - Add all issue type entries in your CSV to a group

Stage 3 - Select Group and action

Usage Scenarios

The scenarios to use the Add Group tool can be characterised in 2 ways:

1. Bucket Administration - During regular and scheduled maintenance activities such as metadata updates, as a need arises during processing as per the to collect a subset of the artefacts involved into a group for later action eg. Placeholder management
2. Specific Task Use Case - As a dedicated one off activity aimed at specifically moving artefacts to a group eg. Make all bucket artefacts available in one group

Specific Task Use Case - Create a Bulk CSV ONLY for the purpose of moving artefacts to a Group

This specific use case can be more convenient to move large quantities of artefact to a new Group than using My Collection. You can use the powerful filtering within Excel to reduce a bucket level export to a large subset to import. Or a Group report to add group artefacts to another etc - think laterally!

In THIS specific case you don't need to execute the Bulk CSV report to add all report artefacts to a Group if you follow these instructions:

1. Generate a Bucket or Group level Bulk CSV report that best contains all of the artefacts you need to add
2. Download Original CSV and edit ONLY Column E, local_file_name rows with a full stop (period) using Edit->Fill->Down. (This column is used for file matching if uploading files in Bulk CSV and is NOT metadata - all we want to do is force Bulk CSV to see a benign change to the rows we want so that the entries will be included for All Artefact options later, without having to execute the report)
   
3. Save the edited file and import it.
4. Note the pending numbers in the Artefact Changes pie chart match your expected number.
5. IF there are any Critical Errors after import, these need to be corrected and re-imported else they won't be added when selecting All Artefacts. (if it is a small number of Criticals, you may decide to ignore and use collection to move them if convenient)
6. Use the Add Group->Artefacts->All of them menu flow to add to your target group.