[Feature Request]: Allow a default group to be set to added tags/correspondents/document types/custom fields

[sylaan]

Hello clusterzx,

My Paperless NGX is used by multiple users and some of them have to be able to see other user's tags/documents/etc. In Paperless GUI, this is nicely solved by configuring a default group for all created entities, where all needed users are part of.

This is not the case when adding things via API, as paperless-ai is doing, so the end-result is that (for example) other users don't see the tags created by paperless-ai (which uses the token of a specific user).

As far as I understand, the Paperless API allows setting a group for all entities upon creation. I believe this would be an easy fix where paperless-ai would use an environment variable (such as DEFAULT_GROUP or some such, which can contain one or more comma-separated group names, set via .env or via the paperless-ai GUI) when adding new entities to paperless. The required group IDs needed for the actual API create calls can be easily retrieved via API as well.

It would be nice if such a feature would be added, it would make paperless-ai usable for Paperless instances with multiple users part of the same group.

Thanks,
Sylaan

[BenGig]

I just ran into the same issue. I did a test: currently, the items are created without a value for the owner. Paperless then uses the group of the creating user, and the items becomes invisible for anybody else.

But if the item is created with a null owner:

this.client.post('/tags/', { name: tagName, owner: null });

then the item gets no owner and is visible by all user. Not exactly as flexible as configurable owners, but an improvement

[sylaan]

Paperless-ai issues the API POST call for tag creation without a value for owner (i.e. with the "owner" key in the payload missing completely, as far as I can tell) but paperless itself creates it with the owner of the token.

And you are right, a very quick and dirty solution would be to set the owner the null in the POST call but maybe in some cases it will have privacy issues. I would not personally care since all the users in my Paperless instance are in one group but that might not be the case for other users.

I still think the best would be to allow configurable default groups.