Automation¶
Note
This is new feature which will be part of 1.4.0 release (available in August 2020).
With Automation feature you can do 3 things:
- automatically moving (cut/paste) of documents into their destination folder
- automatically extract metadata from the document
- and please forgive me for repetition - automatically extract pages
The whole idea is to remove boring and repetitive tasks.
Each automate instance consists of two very important parts:
- matching - what documents it applies to?
- action - what shall it do with matched document?
Matching¶
In order to decide if automate instance applies to current document - it will look for certain keywords in the document. For example if document contains capital case AWO and number 2020, then this document must be routed to folder AWO/2020; if document contains word Linode and year 2020, then it will be routed to Invoices/CloudExpenses/2020.
Caution
It is crucial to understand that matching is per Page. Thus, statement match a document is not entirely correct. Automation processes is triggered every time when OCR for certain page completes. OCRed page is sent to automation module and Papermerge will try to match each automate instance on it. In case there is a match - it is considered that document matched automate criteria, although technically correct is - page of respective the document matched!
There are 4 different ways to match:
- Any
- All
- Literal
- Regular Expression
With Any matching algorithm, document matches if any of mentioned keyword will match.
With All, document matches if all mentioned keywords are found in document. Keywords order does not matter.
With Literal, match means that the text you enter must appear in the document exactly as you’ve entered it.
You can use Regular Expression for matching criteria. Regular expressions is a general programming method of text matching. Computer programmers usually know what it means.