Using Bulk Document Actions

You can use bulk document actions to make changes on up to 1,000 documents at once. These actions include editing field values, starting Read & Understood workflows, and more. In PromoMats, you can also use bulk actions to generate a compliance binder and 2253 form.

An Admin must enable this functionality on your vault. Once enabled, it is only available to users with a security profile that includes the Document: Bulk Update permission. See security details below.

Select Documents from the Library

To select library documents for a bulk action:

  1. Open the Library.
  2. Use the views, search, or filters to narrow down the list of documents. Once you’ve started the bulk editing process, you can deselect individual documents, but you can only access filters and search at this stage.
  3. From the Library Actions menu, choose which set of documents to select. You can choose only the documents visible on the current page, or all documents (up to 1000) that fit the active filter and search criteria.
  4. From the Refine Selection page, review the list of selected documents and deselect any that you do not want to include in the bulk edit.
  5. Click Next. See below for help on the various bulk options. For PromoMats Vaults, you also need go generate Form 2253.

You can select and export entire binders with the document export bulk action.

Select Documents from Binders

To select binder documents for a bulk action:

  1. Open a binder.
  2. Navigate to the section containing the documents to edit.
  3. Make sure the binder layout is set to Compact View.
  4. From the section’s Actions menu above the list of documents, choose which set of documents to select. You can choose only the documents visible on the current page, or all documents (up to 100).
  5. From the Refine Selection page, review the list of selected documents and deselect any that you do not want to include in the bulk edit.
  6. Click Next. See below for help on the various bulk options.

Select Documents from Reports

Selecting documents from a report is especially useful if you’re editing fields for more than 1,000 documents. In this situation, create a report with a filter that specifies the undesired value. For example, you want to move all documents from Site 1001 to Site 1002. The report filter would specify “Site is equal to 1001.” After running the report, use the maximum bulk action selection (1,000) and complete the action. Once the first action is complete, refresh the report and repeat the process.

Bulk action selection is not available on reports that use groupings.

  1. Run a tabular (not matrix) report that returns documents. These reports will have a report type like Document or Product with Document.
  2. From the section’s Actions menu above the list of documents, choose which set of documents to select. You can choose only the documents visible on the current page, or all documents (up to 1,000).
  3. From the Refine Selection page, review the list of selected documents and deselect any that you do not want to include in the bulk edit.
  4. Click Next. See below for help on the various bulk options.

Select Documents from Cart

To select documents in your Cart for a bulk action:

  1. Open your Cart.
  2. From the Actions menu above the list of documents, choose which set of documents to select. You can choose only the documents visible on the current page, or all documents.
  3. From the Refine Selection page, review the list of selected documents and deselect any that you do not want to include in the bulk edit.
  4. Click Next. See below for help on the various bulk options.

Update Document Fields

Not all fields are available to edit using bulk document actions:

  • Field must be common across all selected documents.
  • Field cannot have dependencies.
  1. From the Choose Action page, select Edit Fields.
  2. Click Next.
  3. On the Edit Fields page, Vault displays editable fields.
  4. Edit a field value across all documents by clicking the Edit field (pencil) icon and entering the new value. If the field is already populated on a document, this new value will replace the existing value. If you edit the field but leave it empty, Vault will clear the field across all selected documents.
  5. Optional: Reset a field to its existing values by clicking the Revert (circular arrow) icon.
  6. Click Next.
  7. From the Confirmation page, review the summary of changes.
  8. Click Finish. When the changes are complete, a notice will appear in your Notifications page and Vault will send you an email.

Start Workflows

Begin a Read & Understood workflow using this functionality. For each bulk action, you may only select a single workflow that Vault will start for all selected and valid documents.

When selecting workflow participants, Vault does not limit the list of users. You may be able to select users that are not allowed in a specific role on a specific document because of Allowed Users settings or Dynamic Access Control. When this occurs, Vault allows you to continue with the bulk action, but does not complete the invalid user assignments. You will receive a failure notification for any assignments that Vault could not complete.

  1. From the Choose Action page, select Start Workflow.
  2. Click Next to open the Choose Workflow page.
  3. Choose a Read & Understood workflow. You can only start a workflow on documents that share the same lifecycle and are in the same lifecycle state, so Vault displays the available workflows by lifecycle and state.
  4. Click Next to open the Edit Workflow Details page.
  5. Fill in workflow details (role assignees, due dates, etc.) like you would when starting the workflow for an individual document.
  6. Click Next.
  7. From the Confirmation page, review the summary of changes.
  8. Click Finish. When the changes are complete, a notice will appear in your Notifications page and Vault will send you an email. Once you’ve started the workflow, you can manage each document’s workflow individually, for example, by canceling tasks for one document’s workflow without affecting the others.

Change Document States

The bulk state change action does not verify the conditions for conditional user actions until you complete the action. Therefore, Vault may display and allow you to select actions that aren’t valid for all documents included in the bulk action. Documents that don’t meet the specified conditions will remain in their original state. Checked out documents cannot change states.

  1. From the Choose Action page, select Change State.
  2. Click Next.
  3. On the Choose State Change page, select the new state for your documents. You can only change the state of documents that are in the same lifecycle and lifecycle state, so Vault displays only the available states by lifecycle and state.
  4. Click Next to open the Confirmation page. Review the summary of changes before moving on.
  5. Click Finish. When the changes are complete, a notice will appear in your Notifications page and Vault will send you an email.

A user with the appropriate legal permissions can perform a bulk action to apply or remove an approved legal hold.

  1. From the Choose Action page, select Apply Legal Hold or Remove Legal Hold.
  2. Click Next to open the Edit Details page.
  3. Select the approved legal hold you want to apply or deselect the legal hold you want to remove.
  4. Click Next to open the Confirmation page and review the summary of documents.
  5. Click Finish. When the changes are complete, a notice will appear in your Notifications page and Vault will send you an email.

Delete Documents

You can only delete Planned documents, including those in a binder, unless an Admin overrides the default configuration.

  1. From the Choose Action page, select Delete Documents.
  2. To check if you have the Delete Documents permission on the selected documents, click Calculate Permissions. This will tell you how many documents you have permission to delete.
  3. Click Next to open the Confirmation page and review the summary of documents you chose for deletion. This action cannot be reversed.
  4. Click Finish. When the changes are complete, a notice will appear in your Notifications page and Vault will send you an email.

Create Document Relationships

You can use bulk actions to create inbound or outbound document relationships. With this action, you select a relationship type and choose to either create an inbound relationship from a chosen document, or an outbound relationship to a chosen document. When searching for documents to link, Vault excludes documents you selected for bulk action.

When you choose the Link to selected documents option, you create an inbound document relationship from the document you choose.

  1. From the Choose Action page, select Create Document Relationship.
  2. Select Link to selected documents.
  3. Select a relationship type from the picklist. You cannot select system-managed relationship types, such as Based On and Original Source. Some relationship types are not valid for all document types. If you select an invalid relationship type, Vault notifies you of the error after.
  4. Select a document from the picklist.
  5. Select a version if the relationship type source is version-specific. This means that the created relationship will be associated with the document you’re linking from. If the relationship type target is version-specific, the relationship will always be linked to the specific target version.
  6. Click Next to open the Confirmation page. This page provides a summary of the number documents to be updated, the relationship type created, and lists the impacted documents.
  7. Click Finish. When Vault completes the action, you will receive a notification via email and in the Notifications page within Vault.

When you choose the Link from selected documents option, you create an outbound document relationship from the document you choose. We recommend using this option as a best practice.

  1. From the Choose Action page, select Create Document Relationship.
  2. Select Link from selected documents.
  3. Select a relationship type from the picklist. Vault only lists supported relationship types; you cannot select system-managed relationship types, such as Based On, Original Source or Attachments. Some relationship types are not valid for all document types. If you select an invalid relationship type, Vault notifies you of the error after.
  4. Select a document from the picklist.
  5. Select a version if the relationship type target is version-specific. This means that the relationship will always be linked to the specific target version. If the relationship type source is version-specific, the created relationship is associated with the document you’re linking from.
  6. Click Next to open the Confirmation page. This page provides a summary of the number documents to be updated, the relationship type created, and lists the impacted documents.
  7. Click Finish. When Vault completes the action, you will receive a notification via email and in the Notifications page within Vault.

Supported Relationship Types

This action supports the following custom relationship types:

  • Claims
  • Components
  • License Files
  • Patient Labeling
  • Product Labeling
  • Related Documents
  • Related Materials
  • Related Pieces
  • Related Claims
  • Supporting Documents

Your organization may have worked with Veeva Services to create additional custom relationship types for your Vault.

Failure to Bulk Create Document Relationships

Bulk actions to create document relationships will fail in the following situations. If this occurs, Vault will send an error notification after the action completes.

  • You selected an invalid relationship type for the source or target document type. You can see which relationship types apply to a specific document from the fields panel of the Doc Info page.
  • You selected a relationship type that doesn’t allow all document types as target documents. The documents you selected as the target did not have an allowed document type.

If your Vault uses Text and Claims Management, you can extract data from existing link annotations on a defined set of documents to download a ZIP file containing CSVs for Claims, Link Targets, and Claim Targets. You can then load these files into Vault Loader to populate the claims library. Annotations for this action must be:

  • Manually created Document links
  • Applied to a text selection
  • Direct links to documents or anchors

This action is not available from the cart, and is only available in Tabular view. The visible columns in the Tabular view determine the data set retrieved by the bulk action.

  1. From the Choose Action page, select Get Link Annotation Data.
  2. Click Next to open the Confirmation page and review the summary of selected documents.
  3. Click Finish. When the export is complete, a notice will appear in your Notifications page and Vault will send you an email. The notifications include a link to download a ZIP file containing three CSV files.
  4. Use Vault Loader to import the CSV files.

You must have the Bulk Update document permission to perform the Get Link Annotation Data bulk action.

Create Batches

This action supports the Batch Approval feature. It creates a new Batch object record and associates the selected documents with the record through their Batch Number field.

  1. From the Choose Action page, select Create Batch.
  2. To check if you have the Edit Fields permission on the selected documents, click Calculate Permissions. This will tell you how many documents you have permission to add to a new batch.
  3. Click Next to open the Confirmation page and review the summary of documents you chose for the batch.
  4. Click Finish. When the Batch record creation is complete, a notice will appear in your Notifications page and Vault will send you an email.

Add Documents to Binders

You can perform a bulk action to add documents to a new binder, or to an existing binder. Vault always adds documents to the top level (“root”) section of the binder. If the binder’s root section already includes one of the selected documents, Vault does not add that document again.

To add documents to a new binder:

  1. From the Choose Action page, select Add to Binder.
  2. Select Create New.
  3. Select the document type for the binder from the Choose document type field.
  4. Click Next to open the Edit Details page and enter information for all required binder fields.
  5. Click Next to open the Confirmation page and review a summary of the binder field values and documents you are adding to the binder.
  6. Click Finish. When the action is complete, a notice will appear in your Notification page and Vault will send you an email. These notices include the number of documents successfully or unsuccessfully added to the binder as well as links to each document. Documents unsuccessfully added to the binder will not stop the bulk action from completion.

To add documents to an existing binder:

  1. From the Choose Action page, select Add to Binder.
  2. Select Add to Existing.
  3. Select a binder from the Select binder to add documents to field. You can see any binders you have permission to edit.
  4. Click Next to open the Confirmation page and review a summary of the documents you are adding to the binder.
  5. Click Finish. When the action is complete, a notice will appear in your Notification page and Vault will send you an email. These notices include the number of documents successfully or unsuccessfully added to the binder as well as links to each document. Documents unsuccessfully added to the binder will not stop the bulk action from completion.

Export Documents

With the document export bulk action, you can download source files, renditions, field values, and audit trails for multiple documents at once, including entire binders and their contents.

  1. From the Choose Action page, select Document Export.
  2. Click Next.
  3. Use the Choose Artifacts option. If you include binders in the export, Vault bases the Follow Version Binding Rule on the binding option set for each binder. For document exports without binders, this option exports only the latest document versions in the export.
  4. Choose a Version Selection option to apply to documents in selected binders.
  5. Under Define Document Naming Rule, select which document field to use for naming exported files.
  6. Click Next.
  7. Click Next to open the Confirmation page and review the summary of documents you chose for the export action.
  8. Click Finish. When the export is complete, a notice will appear in your Notifications page and Vault will send you an email. The notifications include a link to download a ZIP file containing your documents.

Export Artifact Options

For the component documents that you export, you can choose to include:

Renditions
Use the drop-down to select the rendition types to include. Viewable rendition, which exports the (typically auto-generated) PDF rendition of your document, is the most common. If the source file is a PDF, there is no separate viewable rendition. The drop-down list includes all available rendition types. Some may not apply to the documents you’ve selected.
Source Documents
This option exports the source file for a document. Source documents can be any type of file (ZIP, DOCX, CSV, etc.).
Document Fields
This option creates a single CSV file (TXT file if localization is enabled) listing each downloaded file and the associated document fields. If you download both viewable renditions and source files, the CSV file contains a separate record for each.
Document Attachments
This option exports attachments that exist on selected documents. Use the drop-down to select either the Latest Version of the attachments or All Versions.
Document Audit Trail
Select this checkbox to export document audit trails. The audit trails include all document versions. Choose between exporting these logs as a PDF or CSV. TXT export is available if localization is enabled in your Vault.

Document Versions & Binder Selection

For selected documents, Vault downloads the content associated with the latest document version. If you do not have access to the latest version of a document, you cannot download artifacts for that document.

If you’ve selected binders, Vault follows the Version Selection setting. This may be major versions, major and minor versions, or versions bound to that binder. The contents of the ZIP file reflect the binder’s hierarchy, with folders and sub-folders for each binder, binder section, and nested binder.

Overlays & Signature Pages

Viewable renditions may export with or without their overlays and signature pages. This depends on your Vault’s settings.

File & Folder Naming

Vault uses the following standards for naming files during export:

  • Document file names: Selected document field, plus the file type extension, for example, REF-0023.docx. If the document field selected is blank, Vault defaults to Document Number.
  • Binder folder names: Document Name, for example, Compliance Pack CC-39.
  • Binder section folder names: Section name, for example, References.
  • Document fields file: “export_summary” plus date and time, for example, export_summary_2013_05_14_14_09_00_EDT.csv.
  • Attachment folder names: Document Name suffixed with _attach, for example, Compliance Pack CC-39_attach. If truncation would cause two attachment folder names to be identical, Vault replaces the last character of one of the truncated names with a numeric identifier, for example, Compli_attach and Compl2_attach.

If an Admin has enabled the Apply user-defined value as folder and file names in export option, the Export File Name document field is editable on the Doc Info page for each document, and binder section folder names are editable when editing binders.

Folder Path Length Restriction

Vault will truncate filenames and folder names for documents which would exceed the maximum character count specified by your Admin for in binder export settings. By default, this maximum is 230 characters. The character count includes all characters from the top level (drive letter in Windows) through the file extension. For example, the folder path “C:/Docs/CC123.pdf” is 17 characters.

Export Size Limits

You cannot export more than 50,000 artifacts and export ZIP files may not exceed 5GB, by default. You’ll see an error notification if a requested export exceeds either limit.

About Calculate Permissions

You can click the Calculate Permissions link to display the number of documents you have permission to perform bulk actions on.

Bulk Action Processing Time

Bulk changes (including role assignments) occur asynchronously, meaning that there may be a delay before you see the changes, particularly on Vaults with a lot of activity. Once you confirm a bulk action, Vault puts the changes in a queue with other asynchronous tasks. When the changes are complete, a notice appears in your Notifications page and Vault sends a notification email.

Read & Understood Workflows on Older Versions

When you use bulk document actions to start a Read & Understood workflow, you may need to route a document version other than the latest. Therefore, we respect the selected version when performing these actions, even if it is not the latest. All other bulk actions act on the latest version you can see.

Related Security & Permissions

Vault’s comprehensive security settings can control which users have access to bulk document updates.

Security Profile

Document: Bulk Update
You must have a security profile that grants either this permission or Documents: Bulk Delete to see the Actions menu in the Library, binders, or reports, which allows you to access bulk action options. This permission, combined with the correct document role permissions, allows access to any enabled bulk actions.
Objects: Batch: Create
You must have a security profile that grants this permission in order to use the Create Batch action. This is in addition to document role permissions that allow you to edit the Batch Number field on individual documents.
Documents: Bulk Delete
You must have a security profile that grants either this permission or Library: Bulk Update to see the Actions menu in the Library, binders, or reports, which allows you to access bulk action options. This permission, combined with the correct document role permissions, allows access to delete documents.
Documents: Download Document
This permission is required to download document source files through the Document Export action.
Documents: Download Rendition
This permission is required to download document renditions through the Document Export action.
Objects: Controlled Copy User Input: Read, Create
In Vaults using Extensible Controlled Copy, this permission is required to create the Controlled Copy User Input record when downloading a controlled copy.
Objects: Controlled Copy Trace: Read
In Vaults using Extensible Controlled Copy, this permission is required to view the Controlled Copy Trace record Vault creates from the data entered in the Controlled Copy User Input dialog and record.

Document Type

Create Binder
You can only create binders if you have the Create Binders permission on at least one document type. This also controls which document types you can select for a new binder.

Document Role

View Document
Only documents on which you have the View Document permission will be available for selection. However, the ability to select a document does not mean you will be able to perform all bulk actions on it. This permission is required in order to download document field values through the Document Export action.
View Content
This permission is required in order to download renditions through the Document Export action.
Edit Fields
You can only edit field values for documents on which you have the Edit Fields permission. This permission is needed if you wish to use bulk document editing, the Create Batch action, or the Create Relationships action.
Edit Relationships (PromoMats & MedComms)
You can only use the Create Document Relationship action for documents on which you have the Edit Relationships permission. This permission is only available for PromoMats and MedComms. The Edit Fields permission controls editing relationships in all other Vault applications.
Edit Document
You can only edit binders (structure, not document fields) on which you have the Edit Document permission. This permission is needed to use the Add to Existing Binder bulk action.
Edit Sharing Settings
You can only add users to a role or remove users from a role for documents on which you have this permission.
Change Owner
You can only use the Change Owner action for documents on which you have the Change Owner permission.
Change Coordinator
You can only use the Change Coordinator action for documents on which you have the Change Coordinator permission.
Start Workflow
You can only start a workflow for documents on which you have this permission. If your Vault uses Atomic Security: Document Lifecycle Actions, you will need permission to execute each specific workflow.
Change State
You can only change the state of documents on which you have this permission. This permission is needed if you wish to use bulk state change. If your Vault uses Atomic Security: Document Lifecycle Actions, you will need permission to execute each specific state change action.
Delete Document
You can only use bulk document deletion for documents on which you have this permission.
Distribute Controlled Copies
You can only distribute controlled copies of documents on which you have this permission. This permission is needed if you wish to use the bulk generate controlled copy.