Question about Omeka-S, setting item fields to private

Getting Started
1

Hi, newbie here, trying to find my way in Omeka-S and so far getting really enthusiastic about it.

Question: I noticed that when I set some fields in my resource template to “private” this only affects the items which I will from then on produce using that resource template, so for all items that I produced before, using that same template, I have to set those fields to “private” by hand per item. I guess this is expected behaviour?

Is there a way to solve this, for example for this use case: when you have produced a lot of items using a certain resource template and you’re about to create a site and then decide it’s better to set some different fields to private? Wouldn’t it be nice to be able do this in a sort of batch action, or is the work-around to tweak the public site template to not show certain fields of items?

Best,
Jan

2

Resource template settings are mostly about setting defaults for the creation process, so they purposely don’t look back and edit items that you’ve already made. There are a few things that are applied “on the fly” like custom property names that will apply, just because they don’t involve actually editing the items.

But, you don’t have to edit every old item by hand; there’s a batch editing feature that lets you set a property as private for a batch of items all at once.

3

Thank you for your reaction.

I have fiddled a bit with the batch actions and it works, but unfortunately, as far as I can see, with a restriction, but maybe I am still doing something wrong.

I have a setup with multiple item sets, using different resource templates. So when I want to perform a batch action on the items of a specific item set, I use advanced search to select all the items of that particular item set first. But when I then use the batch command “edit all” and provide the action that I need (changing a value to “not public”) and I submit that, I get the general “Omeka-S encountered an error”.

I found out that I can only make this work in case I add one extra step in between: after selecting the item set, I select all the items of that item set that are displayed on the page on the screen and then perform the batch action, using the “edit selected” command. But unfortunately this only works for the items that are displayed on the page on the screen, so not for the items on the next pages. This means that I have to do this for all pages with items separately.

Best,
Jan

4

Doing them all at once or a page at a time should both work, but page at a time is a fine workaround. You can also tweak the page limit setting to do that workaround in fewer steps.

You’d have to investigate the error you’re getting to see what’s going wrong with the all at once option. Sometimes we’ve seen errors there be caused by modules.

5

Thank you for your reaction.

For now I will stick to the changing per page workaround and I also thought of increasing the amount of items per page to make this easier.

Regarding the error: I run Omeka-S on shared hosting and I only use one module, the Custom Vocab one; furthermore I don’t have much more information to go on, unless you can point me to some file(s) ‘under the hood’ to explore this a bit further.

Best,
Jan