Ability to combine multiple documents into one
I'm new to Mayan EDMS so maybe this feature already exists, but I'm looking for a way to combine multiple documents into one single multi-page document. My scanner scans one page at a time into individual JPGs and provides its own proprietary software to "staple" multiple pages into a single PDF. This could be used for multi-page forms, etc. that only make sense together (so creating a cabinet/subcabinet for them would not be very helpful).
Below I've mocked up an example that would use the All Documents dropdown to add a "Combine Documents" link, taking you to a form similar to the Advanced Download page. This page could have the following features:
- Combine documents that were originally images OR PDFs together into a multi-page document.
- Allow to keep or delete the individual pages used to create the combined document.
- Allow reordering of documents (for simplicity, if one doc has multiple pages those pages must be consecutive)
- Retain as much metadata from the individual documents that we can.
I am still learning how Mayan EDMS works, so I will not catch everything, but here are a few bits of behavior that need to be worked out:
- Is it feasible to allow combining documents of different "type"? What type will the resulting file be?
- Will there be restrictions on workflow/status of the documents to-be-merged, or is it smarter to send the workflow of the new document back to the initial state?
- Can the document Properties tab be merged?
- Can the document Metadata tab be merged? How to handle duplicate metadata?
- Can the OCR results be merged?
- Do we lose Event History and Previous Versions of the individual files in the new combined file?
- Can indexes be carried over? How to decide which indexes are kept and which aren't (e.g. create date changes)