API to manage system lock and/or improved lock management UI

Jonah Caplan
edited May 2020 in
There is currently no way to update tags and other fields with tracking data after an item is locked. So if you want to do a bulk update, you need to change the status from approved back to draft, then make your changes then move everything back to approved. This can be frustrating if the set you're looking at is very large and some things are approved while others are draft. There are a couple of threads about wanting to be able to configure the lock to only apply to certain fields. That's definitely the best solution. But there are some smaller changes that could allow for less invasive workarounds.

An alternative would be if it was easy to wipe the system lock off of a bunch of items at once, perform the change, and then lock them again, without moving the item out of approved status. The current UI to unlock system locked items is totally unusable if there's more than a few dozen locks (we have many thousands). There would need to be a search and a bulk update for that menu to be usable. There's also no way to batch update back to locked.

The API could be a workaround, except that it looks like you can't unlock a system lock from the REST API even if you're an admin with the permission to do it from the UI. 

In both cases, it would still be good to be able to re-apply the system lock, rather than to apply a user lock afterwards, but that's not strictly necessary.

Another option, which is still a lot less flexible than allowing to lock specific fields, but probably more accessible than using the API for general users, would just be to let admins edit or bulk edit items that are system locked with an "are you sure??" dialog. It still turns admins into a bottleneck, when most people are describing use cases where it would be really nice to let all users have this privilege on a subset of fields, but it'd be better than nothing.




Jonah Caplan
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