I have no support/technical question and have seen the support category. (Be aware that direct support questions will be deleted.)
on
Which general topic do you have
Is there any way to display the date or time in which the upload was made in NEXTCLOUD?
For example: If I create a text file on my computer and a week later I upload this file to nextcloud, it will appear that the file was uploaded a week ago. I need the file to appear on the date it was placed on nextcloud. Is this possible?
If i Upload by Webdav it’s ok. It appears ( uploaded a few seconds ).
Actually, no. Nextcloud shows when the file was last modified (in the list view of the Files app and in the Versions tab in the right sidebar), and when it was created (only in the Versions tab in the right sidebar).
I’ve just tested this by uploading a file via Gnome Accounts/Nautilus, and it did indeed change the modification time of the file to the time it was uploaded (the creation time remained unchanged).
I’m not sure if this is caused by the client (GVfs/Nautilus) or the server, but I consider it a bug because, in my humble opinion, a file upload should never mess with the modification or creation time of a file, and in order to display something like the upload date, some mechanism would have to be implemented in Nextcloud that doesn’t change any file attributes.
Btw, this doesn’t happen when uploading files via the Nextcloud desktop client or via a web browser, which is the correct behaviour imho.
I worked for many years with DMS and ECM software and both dates can be relevant.
Especially for lawyers both dates can be relevant.
That said, if we are dealing with just one date here, we should be able to rely on what that date represents.
If I am dealing only with my personal documents and on my desktop, I probably really want the date when I created or last edited the document, rather than effective upload date to NextCloud. But then I most probably also use the desktop sync client which then should make both dates the same. On the other hand, if others upload documents, for me the date when they last edited it prior to uploading to Nextcloud is most probably irrelevant or even missleading for me. - More important than edit date for me could be then either the date when a person shared the document with me.
But besides the requirements, there is the technical issue on upload via web where original creation and edit date of the file is not available (at least that is what I remember from my work in such situations). - So then always having the upload date as date is probably then the best solution. That said you could loose information you have now. Because the effective upload date can always be seen in the history.
In a perfect world I would have 3 date columns/attributes file creation/edit date, upload date, sharing date and a fourth one containing the latest of all those 3.
Just to be clear, I’m not saying that tracking the upload date/time in Nextcloud isn’t a valid use case, but as I said, it would have to be implemented as an independent feature in Nextcloud, not by “randomly” changing the modification date in the file attributes during uploads, or changing any of the file attributes for that matter.
So I won’t change my mind, for me the behaviour on WebDAV uploads is a bug, and I may sound like a broken record at this point, but I’ll say it again: Under no circumstances should Nextcloud or any client software change any file attributes when uploading a file, and certainly not by default, without warning! By the way, it is also bad design/UX if an upload via WebDAV produces a different result than an upload via browser or desktop client.
I have already posted a link to the feature request on GitHub, which is still open, so perhaps you could post your use case there, along with any ideas on how best to implement this, so the developers can see it.
I made some tests and I am really surprised - even uploading an older plain textfile via Nextcloud web interface which surely never was uploaded before is shown with the original file date. - Just did some research, as it is long time ago (really long time ago) I last fiddled with uploads via web: Modern browsers/javascript do get file metadata on uploads and not just the content.
Again, when I just look at it as a single person who just wants to save the work in the cloud as a backup, when the laptop dies or to access files from anywhere via smartphone etc, I prefer to see file modification date in nextcloud rather than the effective upload date (which could differ by a few days also, e.g. if desktop-sync-client was closed or crashed and was started only a few days later). I have such a case for an rsync job that gets data copied from somewhere else and does not run every day. However, the data that is arriving there gets synced to Nextcloud via desktop-sync-client. In that case I do not want to loose the original file date which in that case is more important to me than the effective upload date to Nextcloud.
As I see the situation to solve this situation that everyone can be satisfied, we need 2 dates - one from the file and one showing the date and time when Nextcloud got the new file or update. But to display that information in a new column automatically (so having two dates) would obviously cause confusion for a lot of people in the first place.
Currently there is no column configuration available, so we would need configurable columns then too. So much work needed.
As a workaround for the current situation you need to click on details and activity. There you can see when the file was really uploaded. More clicks obviously - not sure if that helps you.
