Archive notes

[tclavier]

As a user I want to archive notes. My objective is to see only active notes on my phone to select it quickly and never loose my old notes.

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[korelstar]

You could use a category named "Archive" and move all old notes to that category. For "active" notes use other categories. You can easily filter by category then.

[tclavier]

Your solution is probably very good for desktop application (in browser) but it's not a solution for android app. And I only use Android application. The team of android application follow the nextcloud/notes roadmap : no feature not present in official app.

In other hand, take time to order my notes in folders and subfolders is not to move all my notes in one big archive directory without order. For information i have 1127 notes in more than 100 folders and subfolders.

[0x47]

Are there any plans to add this feature? I also use the Andoid app and for me this the one feature that is still missing.

[stefan-niedermann]

Android dev here: I can confirm that we have to find a solution that works also on the web app before thinking about an implementation in the Android app.

We have to make sure that this solution is still working with other sync clients and also with pure file sync clients.

Each category represents a folder on the filesystem.

@korelstar i could imagine to use your idea (simply a category called Archive(d)) but with a special treatment on the UI. I am thinking about some kind of Archive-button which prefixed the category or the Note with Archive/, so the note will get moved to the archive without loosing the category information. This folder would not get listed as selectable category but would be displayed separate on the UI and provide unarchive as an action for the notes which removes the Archive/-prefix.

I think there isn't even an API change requiered. Since we would treat the category special, we do not need to translate it (can be done on the UI level) which would make the whole idea more reliable.

What do you think?

[korelstar]

If we really want to change the implemation for this, we could use tags instead. Like for marking a file as favorite, we could use a special archived tag. However, in contrast to the favorite tag (which is defined in Nextcloud server), the archived tag would be a special thing for the notes app and is seen as normal tag from other apps.

However, as an advantage, we would have every category only once. In the archived as folder approach, category folders may exist twice.

[stefan-niedermann]

However, as an advantage, we would have every category only once. In the archived as folder approach, category folders may exist twice.

I don't exactly get this. If one moves a note from music into an archived folder, the category would be archived/music - therefore no two tags music would exist...?

[korelstar]

If you have multiple notes in music and some of them are archived, you will have some notes in archived/music/ (the archived ones) and some in music/ (the non-archived ones). Hence, you have two places for your music notes.

[oleua]

More, the archived items should be disappearing from the general list of items, and accessible only with a special switcher. A user should be able to unarchive or delete them at all.

[kxkv]

(disclaimer: not ideal, and not for everyone, but:)

While waiting for this feature, I have made a simple shell script that I run to archive notes.

1. I have created an "archive" category
2. I have created a target directory for archived notes
3. I run the below script to move notes from the archive category to the archive directory outside of Notes

notes_archive_dir='/media/drive2/nass/cb/nextcloud/Notes/archive'
archive_target_dir='/media/drive2/nass/cb/nextcloud/Notes.archive'
mv ${notes_archive_dir}/* ${archive_target_dir}

As my computer has Nextcloud installed, and the notes dir syncing, I can simply have this script running on my PC.