Worksheet autolinking is an operation that allows a user to auto-populate one or more document fields with links to documents.  

A common use case for this operation is when a worksheet contains references to a document, usually imported from a spreadsheet. By adding a document field to this worksheet and preforming an autolinking operation, the relevant document can be accessed directly from the worksheet, saving users the need to find it on the documents page.  

To perform an autolink operation, the relevant worksheet must include a field that contains a unique identifier which references a specific document in the project. This field must be of type short text.  

The unique reference must correspond to one or more metadata fields on the documents page in the same project. This could be the document opus ID, or some other identifier. It could also be the filename, although using filename as a unique identifier can cause problems if the project has multiple documents with the same filename. Unless the filename forms part of a concatenated reference format it is not recommended to use as a unique reference. 

Creating an autolink reference 

An autolink reference is created by selecting the records that should be autolinked to a document. If this is every record in the worksheet simply click the tickbox on the header row. 

Tip: If only some records in the worksheet need to be selected, it can be useful to first create a filter to display only the relevant records and then selecting the checkbox on the header row to select all those records, rather than scrolling through the worksheet and selecting individual records.  

Once all relevant records are selected, the autolink dialog is accessed from the ‘Actions’ drop down menu. 

The following options are available when configuring a worksheet autolink: 

Source field 

This is the worksheet field containing the unique document identifier. It must be a field of type short text. 

Field to populate 

The ‘field to populate’ option refers to the worksheet field that will be populated with a linked document. It must be of type ‘Document’ or ‘Multiple documents’. 

+Add reference format 

The reference format is the document metadata field that corresponds to the unique identifier. Often this may simply be the opus ID of the document, but it is possible to build a more complex reference format is necessary. 

 

The text boxes on either side of the ‘select’ drop down allow for the addition of any delimiters that may have been used when creating the unique identifier. For instance, to create an autolink to a document that is referenced as {opus-15}, the reference format should be constructed as ‘{‘ ‘opus-id’ ‘}’ in order to create a match. 

 

Once the reference format is configured, clicking on ‘Find matches’ will match any document in the project to the record containing the matching reference. If the document field is already populated with a document, this will be displayed in the ‘Current value’ field. The ‘New value’ field displays the principal ID of the document that will be linked once the autolink operation is complete. 

Before updating, the autolink dialog will also list the number of new links that will be created; the number of unchanged links;  the number of records that have been found with multiple matches if the ‘field to populate’ is of type multiple documents; the number of records for which a match could not be found; and the number of records that will be updated if a change has been found. 

Clicking ‘Update records’ will perform the autolink operation and create a link to the relevant documents from the worksheet document field.