Persisting Author aspect

[slothrop]

I have noticed in Alfresco 2.1 that the Alfresco-defined Author aspect tends to disappear in documents when they are copied to other spaces.  It persists when a document is moved. 

When the document is a .pdf file which has the author property filled then it is OK.  But when the author is not filled out and I add it after importing it into a space, it goes away when the document is copied (but not when it is moved) to another space.

Is there anything I can do to prevent this.  Adding a workrule that extracts common metadata from incoming content doesn't seem to make any difference.

[sacco]

This behaviour appears to be by design.  The implementation ensures that the  Author  aspect
does not get copied onto the destination node and the source code ( CopyServiceImpl.class )
contains the following comment:

// Do nothing since the author aspect should not be copied‍

We are left to guess why: I have no idea, and there doesn't appear any explanation of what might
be special about the intended semantics of  this aspect anywhere in the documentation.

I had assumed that this aspect was intended to signify the name of the author of the content as
opposed to the creator of the node in the repository (rather like the distinction between the
'From:' and 'Sender:' email headers, but this behaviour is the opposite of what would be required
in this case.  It certainly makes the automatic extraction of the 'Author' from a document pretty
useless!