Allow upload endpoint to store an item without processing (OCR/conversion/analysis) #3344

Problem

Every upload always goes through the full joex pipeline (process-item): archive extract → PDF conversion → text extraction/OCR → preview → text analysis. There is no way for the insertion/upload API to say “just store this; processing is not required (or not required immediately).”

That hurts for large reference files — for example Excel workbooks or big merged PDFs — where we mainly need the binary stored and findable as an item, but do not need text extraction or analysis.

Concrete example

Joex spent nearly 3 hours (02:55:11) processing an Excel upload that we only needed stored for reference:

Joex spent nearly 3 hours processing an Excel upload that we only needed stored.

Current behavior

1. Upload stores file bytes.
2. A process-item (or multi-upload-process) job is always enqueued.
3. The item only becomes UI-visible (Created) after processing finishes (or fails on last retry).

Closest existing knobs:

• upload priority (high/low)
• skipDuplicates
• global joex OCR / NLP config

None of these provide per-upload store-only.

Desired behavior

A per-upload flag that:

1. Creates a visible item + attachments immediately
2. Applies given metadata (folder, tags, direction, language, …)
3. Skips conversion / OCR / text extraction / preview / analysis
4. Allows optional full processing later via the existing reprocess APIs:
   • POST /api/v1/sec/item/{itemId}/reprocess
   • POST /api/v1/sec/items/reprocess

Proposed API strawman

Add optional process (boolean, default true) to ItemUploadMeta.

• process: true (default) — current behavior
• process: false — store-only path: create visible item, skip heavy stages

Available on secured, open/source, and integration upload endpoints; documented in the upload API docs.

Implementation sketch (for discussion)

Keep enqueueing a lightweight process-item job so duplicate-check, CreateItem, and SetGivenData still run, then short-circuit the heavy stages in joex when process: false, and mark the item Created. Reuse existing reprocess for “process later.”

Out of scope (v1)

• Source/tag-based auto-skip (related to [Feature request] Skip OCR for certain source or tag #1766)
• Finer-grained stage flags (e.g. skip OCR only)
• Large-file streaming / upload size improvements (Very large documents cannot be uploaded #1819)

Related

• [Feature request] Skip OCR for certain source or tag #1766 — Skip OCR for certain source or tag
• Very large documents cannot be uploaded #1819 — Very large documents cannot be uploaded
• Recent upload metadata work: optional priority, immediate fileKeys on submit

Happy to implement this if the direction looks good.