Clipboard

You may move objects – or their copies – from one folder to another folder. For this purpose you use your clipboard as follows.

      Click the check boxes of the objects you want to move or copy.

      Click  Edit    Cut  from your top menu bar to transfer the objects to your clipboard, or use cut from the multi-selection toolbar.

      Use  Edit    Copy  or copy from the multi-selection toolbar to transfer copies of the objects selected to your clipboard.

There is a visual feedback from your clipboard: clipboard it is no longer empty.

      Open the folder to which the objects are to be moved.

      Click  Edit    Paste  to insert the objects into this folder.

Note: To copy a folder means to recursively copy all objects that it contains, including fol­ders and subfolders along with their contents. This could use up much storage space.

If you don’t need a real copy of the folder, but only need to access the folder from the ‘old’ as well as from the ‘new’ location, then you have another pos­sibility, that uses up much less disk space.

      Consider creating a link to this folder in your clipboard via action  Link    to Clipboard  (by de­fault, only pos­sible for managers of the folder). A link to an object works like any other folder entry referring to the object. Links serve the purpose of having entries in different places of your folder hierarchy that all refer to the same object without the necessity to copy the object. Destroying a link does not de­stroy the object as long as there are other links, i.e. entries referring to the ob­ject. The link may be inserted any­where in your folder hierarchy.

If you only want to access the folder from your bookmarks

      create a bookmark for this folder via action  Link    as Bookmark  that allows direct access to the fol­der.

Note: You can also move objects without using the clipboard via  Edit    Move  or move from the multi-selection toolbar. For single objects use action  Move  in the action menu.

Full functionality of the clipboard

After a cut, copy or link to clipboard operation you may delay the paste operation. In this case, the clip­board holds all objects that have been cut, copied or linked to it and have not yet been pasted to a new location or deleted to the trash. Your clipboard ‘remembers’ the set of objects that were added by the latest cut, copy or link as the current selection. In the list of objects in the clipboard, the marked check boxes indicate the current selection. You can change the current selection manually by checking and unchecking entries in the clipboard and executing a cut action (cut), while you still are in the clipboard. All objects of the current selection will be transferred to the folder where you next choose  Edit    Paste .

You may also organize your clipboard as a folder hierarchy and even transfer the current se­lection to another folder within your clipboard. This is useful for collecting objects from dif­ferent locations in a folder inside your clipboard in order to, e.g., archive them later (see 13.1 Archiving and transferring objects).

Who owns cut, copied and pasted objects?

Ownership becomes important when disk space control (‘quota system’) has been activated for your BSCW server, because all objects that you own are added to your disk space usage, and this may eventually lead to a violation of your disk space limit. Moving, copying and generating links to objects may change the ownership.

When you create an object, the object is owned by the owner of the folder in which the object was created (and not by you, its creator, should you not also be the owner of the folder!). One could say that, by default, ownership is inherited along the folder hierarchy. When you are invited to a workspace, however, the workspace entry appears in your home folder, of which you are the owner – but you are not the owner of the workspace. This workspace entry over­rides ownership inheritance and sets a new owner. In the following discussion we concentrate on these two standard cases: a document that you have created within a possibly shared folder, and a shared workspace to which you have been invited.

When you cut the document, it is transferred to your clipboard, and you become its owner; all other members of the folder from where you have cut the document lose access to the docu­ment. The document may be said to inherit ownership and membership from your clipboard. When you paste the document, the owner of the folder or workspace to which the document was pasted becomes also the owner of the document, in accordance with the default inheri­tance of ownership.

When you cut the shared workspace, it is also transferred to your clipboard, but ownership and membership remain untouched. The workspace entry does not inherit ownership from your clipboard as it didn’t from your home folder. If you then paste the workspace to one of your private folders, again ownership and membership remain untouched. If you paste the workspace to somewhere inside another workspace, the members of this workspace also be­come members of the pasted workspace, but ownership of the pasted workspace is unchanged (also see 4.1.4.2 Embedding a workspace into another workspace).

Copying document and workspace alike creates copies in your clipboard, of which you are the only member and owner, so to speak ‘private’ copies. Pasting these private copies to a folder transfers ownership to the owner of this folder.

When you create a link to an object in your clipboard, you create an entry in your clipboard that refers to the object and that inherits ownership from your clipboard. You are added to the owners of the object. Linking is only possible if you are a manager of the object; for our two standard cases you would in general only be able to create a link to the document if you are the manager of the containing folder. Pasting the link removes you as owner and adds the owner of the folder or workspace to which the link is pasted. Note that several owners of an object share the disk space used up by the object: with two owners of a 500 kB document, e.g., only 250 kB are added to the disk quota of each owner.

For a further discussion also see 4.2.5 Ownership and ownership transfer.