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FAQ:

How do I delete or rename a file attachment?

Answer:

You can move and delete attachments directly from your browser. Moving lets you transfer an attachment from one topic to another. The soft delete moves an attachment to the special TrashAttachment topic in the Trash web, where it's hidden but can be "undeleted" with system administrator access. Please note that you cannot rename an attachment in the current TWiki release.

Click on action on the file in the FileAttachment table, then in the Update attachment screen choose [Move attachment], and make your changes to that screen.

NOTE: The configuration of your site and your own access permissions determine whether you can access these functions.

Note for system administrators: To remove an attachment permanently move it to the Trash.TrashAttachment topic, then with file-level access, delete the file attachment and its ,v repository file manually from twiki/pub/Trash/TrashAttachment.

Note that this will still not get rid of the META information in the TrashAttachment topic, which means that page will still list the now-deleted files. To remove them, you will need to edit the TrashAttachment.txt file in the filesystem by hand. Then, to show the fact that something has changed (for versioning purposes), you may want to edit the TrashAttachment topic in TWiki.

To really delete all attachments, therefore, is a three step process:

1. In the filesystem go to the Trash/TrashAttachment directory and remove all attachments and their corresponding ,v files
2. In the filesystem, edit the Trash/TrashAttachment.txt data file to remove all the METAs corresponding to those deleted files (this TrashAttachment.txt file will not be in the same Trash/Attachment directory, you'll have to hunt for it)
3. Optional: In the browser go to the TrashAttachment topic in the Trash web, and edit it (a dummy edit if necessary), so that the change will show up in the history of the page.

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Comments & Questions about this Distribution Document Topic

For step #2 above I was unable to find a way to edit (remove) the META information on the TrashAttachment page.

The best I could find was raw=debug but that only lets you view the META info, not change it. There was a reference to an undocumented cmd parameter, but I couldn't find anything else about it and I figured if it's undocumented it's probably not good to rely on it.

If there was a way to edit/change the META information using TWiki itself (i.e., in the browser), then steps 2 and 3 above could be combined.

-- AnthonyRThompson - 02 Sep 2006

There is no documented way to remove META info from topics using the browser. You'd need to edit the file on the shell level to remove the META:FILEATTACHMENT lines. Since this is in the Trash web I would not bother doing that.

-- PeterThoeny - 03 Sep 2006

In 4.2, "More topic actions" / "Delete topic... scans links in [TWiki] web only" results in a Trash web VIEW authorization error oops, whereas "More topic actions" / "# Delete topic... scans links in all public webs (recommended)" does not raise the VIEW oops.

Why the inconsistent authorization oops with the former, and not the latter (aside from the default view being restricted to TWikiAdminGroup)?

-- StephenMossbarger - 10 Jul 2008

This could be a bug. Please file a bug report.

-- PeterThoeny - 13 Jul 2008