Copying a Record

Overview

The Copy Record feature enables users to create a duplicate of an existing Record, including its associated data dependant on the Copy Options selected. This functionality is particularly useful for duplicating best practice templates or recurring activities, significantly reducing manual entry time and improving operational efficiency.

Our use case for this article will be that we have an Asset Register and we want to log four new vending machines at a facility. We will assume the first vending machine has been added to the register and look at how we copy this to efficiently create the other Asset entries in the App.

Accessing the Copy Feature

To initiate the copy process, you must first open the Record that you would like to copy. In our scenario this will be the first vending machine that was added to the Asset Register. From the open Record.

1. Click the ellipsis menu (three dots) located in the top-right of the workspace.

2. Select the Copy option from the dropdown menu.

Note: If the Copy option is not visible, this either means you have Read Only access to the Record in which case you will see a grey banner at the top of the Record when you open it, or you need to contact your site administrator to request permission updates.

Copy Options

Upon selecting the Copy option, a dialog box will appear containing a list of checkboxes. These options allow you to specify the scope and depth of the copied Record.

An App Builder can configure which Fields should and should not be copied as part of using the Record Copy feature. They create a 'Template' of which Fields to include in the copy. We will look at this option in more detail later in the article.

The other customisable copy options are:

• Notes - This refers to the specific 'Notes' Field type. These are fields that have a time-lined track of entries from Users. Leave this option unchecked  

• Comments - These are general observations and additional information to include in a Record that there is no specific Field created by the App Builder to store.

• Attachments - These are supplementary documents that have been uploaded against the Record. Enabling Attachments will mean duplicate documents 

• History - This is an Audit Trail of changes that have been made to the Record.

For our example of the vending machine, we would not copy notes as these are specific to the machine, this is also true of comments. We will assume that attachments are general to all machines including the User Manual and so we will choose to include this in our Record copy. History is again specific to the machine so we will not include this option as we are copying to log a new machine.

Having selected the appropriate options we then click 'Copy'. Now we are presented with a modal in which we can choose to view the copied record or remain on the original.

Click on 'Copied Record' to view the new Record and input the specific information for vending machine two.

Template Copy

The Template Copy option allows the user to base the copy on the Fields that the App Builder has included in the template.

Note: By default all Field data values will be copied but if the App Builder has set 'Exclude This Field From Templated Record Copy' for a Field then these values are excluded from the copy.

Going back to our use case of the Vending machines, there will be some general information about the asset common across all machines and there will be some asset specific information that it does not make sense to copy.

The Process Owner can decide which Fields should be included. In our case they have told the App Builder that Serial Number, Acquisition Date, Priority and Notes should not be included. This means that when we copy the initial Record and select Template Copy, these Fields will reset back to blank of a pre-defined default for all new assets.