What?

This PR defaults the draft value to true when it is not set during a duplicate operation.

Why?

It validates the required fields even if the user is trying to duplicate a draft doc.

The regression was introduced when packages/payload/src/collections/endpoints/duplicate.ts was refactored to use the shared parseParams utility instead of manually parsing query parameters.

v3.62.0 (working) — In v3.62.0 of duplicate.ts, the draft parameter was explicitly defaulted to true:

// draft defaults to true, unless explicitly set requested as false
// to prevent the newly duplicated document from being published
const draft = searchParams.get('draft') !== 'false'

v3.77.0 (broken) — In v3.77.0 of duplicate.ts, the endpoint uses parseParams:

const { depth, draft, populate, select, selectedLocales } = parseParams(req.query)

parseParams only sets draft to true if the query string explicitly contains ?draft=true. The admin UI's DuplicateDocument component does not send ?draft=true as a query parameter, so draft is undefined.

The UI does send { _status: 'draft' } in the request body, but that does not influence the draft flag. In createOperation, the validation skip logic depends entirely on the draft argument:

const isSavingDraft = Boolean(draft && hasDraftsEnabled(collectionConfig) && !publishAllLocales)
// ...
skipValidation: isSavingDraft && !hasDraftValidationEnabled(collectionConfig),

Since draft is undefined, isSavingDraft is false, skipValidation is false, and full validation runs — rejecting the duplicate when any required fields are empty.

How?

By setting the draft value as true by default when it is not set during a duplicate operation:

Fixes #15815