Why does New Document sheet only have title and synopsis fields?

[sero]

I want to create many new documents fast in Scrivener on iOS/iPad and also want to add basic metadata like label and notes at the same time. This seems not to be possible currently, because the New Document sheet only has fields for title and synopsis. To add the metadata, I have to create the documents first, and in a second step open the Inspector for the document and edit the fields there.

If the New Document sheet would have the same fields as the Inspector, I would not need the second step and the workflow would be much faster. Because of the sensible layout of the Inspector sheet (title and synopsis are the first two fields), the New Document sheet would in my opinion still be very easy to use and not cluttered or confusing.

Screenshots for comparison:

fullsizeoutput_1fb.jpeg (222.08 KiB) Viewed 1474 times

fullsizeoutput_1fc.jpeg (174.19 KiB) Viewed 1474 times

I would really love to see at least the Label, Status and Notes fields in the New Document sheet, but for consistency I think one could argue that the Inspector sheet could be used as-is to add new documents.

Best,
Sebastian

[AmberV]

The simple answer is most likely that the inspector is programmed to modify existing items in the project, but at the point of creating a new item, nothing yet exists. You are supplying a few pieces of text to create the new item with (title and summary) but to change the label of a thing it needs to be a thing first, and to add notes it would need to have a place to store those notes internally, etc.

That isn’t to say it’s a complete chicken and egg problem with no solution possible (after all new items can be created with existing meta-data intact if you make use of document templates), it’s just that plopping the inspector as a chunk of code and user interface into this panel would most likely not work at all and require some custom coding to make it work, maybe even a whole new underlying approach.

But to step back a moment to an earlier point: have you tried document templates yet? If not, you can experiment with the idea quickly by creating a test folder in your binder, swiping left on it, choosing More, and then “Set as Templates Folder”. Now create a new file in there and set it up the way you like, giving it an informative name (like your “Rule” example), including anything else you wish such as labels, notes, custom icon or even starter text.

Now navigate to another folder, where you wish to make a “Rule” card or whatever, and now when you tap the + button you’ll get a choice of what type of thing to make. For cases where you only have a few different types of things you are creating repetitively, I think that is going to be a better solution all around than even giving you full meta-data control up front.

[sero]

Thank you for bringing up templates for my use case Ioa, they seem to be a perfect fit.

I still think that the New Document sheet is a little to limited for cases that cannot easily be handled with templates. Imagine you do some sort of brain dump and want to add a short (individual) note to each new document. Why shouldn’t you be able to do this right in the New Document sheet?

Best,
Sebastian

[rxuser]

I actually want to reply to this. I have done the exact same thing; opened a new document, added the title and then pasted or typed out a string of text IN SYNOPSIS thinking that is where it would reside. Only then did I wonder where all my text had gone when clicking done. I figured it out that you go into the document to add text, but the first time, it was not very intuitive to me.

[AmberV]

That’s really another matter altogether though isn’t it? You are saying you thought the index card was the text file itself? We are talking about adding additional components to the add view, like a label toggle, not changing anything about what already exists. The synopsis would still go on being the synopsis, and not the main matter of the item being added, that is a fundamental aspect of the design of the software.