Hello!
I’m trying to upload a list of .pdf for the reference work and using the “reference work/title” option of the picklist. I put the exactly same title for the file name and the reference, but it doesn’t match. What can I do to match them?
Thank you for your attention
Hi @juliannafb ,
Thank you for this question!
I’ve identified your problem with the Batch Attachment Uploader’s matching abilities as a bug in Specify. This bug seems to be specific to the Reference Work / Title path when there are spaces in the title value and file name. It is now an open issue on GitHub for our developers to review, issue-8232.
Until this is fixed in a future release, you’ll need to temporarily remove any space values from the Reference work titles and your file names. In Specify, this can be done rather easily by using find and replace to substitute " " for “_” in Batch Edit. The inverse can be done to revert those edits once the attachments are uploaded. I imagine that the file name would have to be stripped of any spaces manually, though.
Thank you again for reaching out and please don’t hesitate to let us know of any remaining questions!
Thank you very much, Bronwyn.
I have two another issues regarding this. Sometimes the title of reference work is very long and the filename doesn’t support the same size. Along that, characters like “:” are not acceptable in filenames. This will require us to constantly customize the titles for the uploads in batch, wich doesn’t seem practical. I believe it would be very useful if the attachment tool also allowed for manual association.
Thank you again for your help,
Julianna
Many thanks for these insights! I will add the additional limitations you found to the GitHub issue.
At this point, it seems like using the title field for uploading has too many complications to be practical as-is. I’d suggest using the Reference Work / ID path to bulk upload these attachments instead.
Alternatively, you can manually add the attachments to the Reference Work Attachments subview on the Reference Work records to avoid any matching complications. I’d recommend grouping the Reference Works in a record set before getting started to help speed up the manual entry process.
@Juliannafb – There is a method for manually uploading attachments via SQL, but it’s very technical and a huge pain. It’s currently the only way to batch upload files to tables when filenames can’t match the field used as the key value (in my case, I had CollectingEventrecords which have IDs formatted like this “YYYY:####”, but the “:” symbol of course can’t be used in a filename, so the only way to batch upload was to do it manually.
This thread has details of that approach. It’s really only practical if you have very attentive IT staff with direct database access and you want to do a big upload all at once, not practical for regular use.
I think this issue is another one that would be best resolved by implementing mapping files for batch attachment which were previously supported in Sp6.