Link between documents

[Matthias84]

Hi, I like to ask, if a feature might be useful to reference / group documents directly? Currently you can make use of tags to group documents, but IMHO this isn't useful if you like to refer only 2..3 documents regularly. Think about a empty form document and the same form but filled, or similar usecases.

[shamoon]

You mean like a "related documents" field?

[C0nsultant]

For large document collections that are (possibly) shared by multiple people, this sounds like a good idea. Firefly III (selfhosted personal finance manager) has a similar option to logically connect multiple transactions:

Having pre-defined options works well in the case of "money goes from A to B". In the context of a DMS, it is less obvious what defaults should be, just because document types are arbitrary. Just a few that quickly come to mind:

• confirms
• cancels
• follows / preceeds
• superseeds
• extends / is part of

[Matthias84]

You mean like a "related documents" field?

Similar, but based on a explicit user action, as @C0nsultant points out. Think of it like referencing tickets in a bugtracker, where they can be linked, but also grouped via milestones?

[jonaswinkler]

Not sure about how to properly do a good UI for selecting target documents. I can see the appeal of links, especially for the mail consumer (link multiple documents from one mail automatically).

However, I'm also pretty close to declaring this as out of scope.

[d8sychain]

Perhaps when the custom metadata feature #274 is done it could be used in a way to relate documents.
Doc A, Doc B, Doc C get a custom field "Reference Number: 123"
Doc D, Doc E get a custom field "Reference Number: 456"

Searching for "Reference Number: 456" would result in the 2 related document

To expand on this, setting a custom field to a specific type, say "ref-#" (e.g. long-text, number, date, ref-#) causes the UI to list other documents on Doc D that match the set "ref-#". Some users might label the custom field e.g. Job Number, P.O. Number, Reference Number, but functions the same based on the field type.

[fdw]

Another, much simpler idea would be to list other documents from the same correspondent and for the same tags.

[seijikun]

Some of the similar tools I looked at solve such use-cases by splitting the architecture into documents and files.
A document can contain 1:n files. Like this, they basically support document groups and "linking".
But this may not map well to how paperless was designed.