Integration of Paperless NGX

[szaiser]

What is the problem you are trying to solve with this feature?

More powerful document handling with help of Paperless NGX
I currently manage documents (e.g., manuals, bills, warranty information) in Paperless NGX. I’d like to fully use Homebox for asset management while also maintaining Paperless NGX’s strengths (OCR, document preview, advanced tagging, global search, etc.).

A native integration between Homebox and Paperless NGX would let users manage their assets and related documents in a frictionless way, playing to each tool’s strengths. This approach would allow asset data to remain authoritative in Homebox, while document management continues to benefit from Paperless NGX’s rich features.

What is the solution you are proposing?

Link Homebox assets to Paperless NGX e.g. via Tags

Introduce a “Paperless Tag” field within Homebox. For each asset in Homebox, users could define one or more Paperless tags. Additionally, Homebox needs some way of authenticating with Paperless. Using a token could work.

For the implementation, we could go step by step:

• Step 1: Minimum scope implementation
  Homebox uses the tag(s) to automatically create links to the paperless documents in the Homebox attachement area. My current assumption is, that given experience with both Homebox and Paperless NGX Api, this can be done in a few days.

• Step 2: Additional document Preview
  In addition to a link, the document is downloaded and previewed with a file viewer, e.g. when hovering over the link. A caching mechanism could be useful here.

• Step 3: Deeper integration with Paperless NGX
  Here I begin to dream a bit and hope that we can actually get a preview object from Paperless and therefore would not even need to cache or download. This feature could work similarly to the way some code editors let you peak preview the code definitions that are in another files. I would not know how to do this at this point.

Possible enhancement
Automatically map Paperless Tags to Homebox labels, thereby completely removing manual steps required in Homebox.

Advantages

• Retains Paperless NGX’s OCR, powerful search, and document previews.
• Centralizes asset data in Homebox, which is better suited for asset management.
• Reduces duplicate effort: we avoid manually moving or re-processing documents.
• Scales nicely as new documents come in or new assets are created—just apply the relevant tag(s).

I welcome any input on how best to integrate these two systems and would be happy to collaborate on an implementation.

What alternatives have you considered?

Right now, I see two options:

• Option (1) Move all documents to Homebox: This would force me to give up Paperless NGX’s strong document-centric features (OCR, previews, advanced tags, searching).
• Option (2) Leave documents in Paperless and link from Homebox: Continue to manage documents in Paperless NGX, tag relevant documents with the Homebox asset name, and link back from Homebox to Paperless.

Option (1) seems too disruptive, since I’d lose the specialized document workflows and search capabilities. Option (2) is workable, but it involves manual tagging and linking without deeper integration.

Additional context

No response

Contributions

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