Theory:
If you dismantle an Item Network container entity, its contents (if Network Chest) are either transfered to your inventory or (if Network Tank) vanish entirely. To avoid the aforementioned behaviour, you have to create a Provide {resource} amount > network amount
type order to feed the contents back to the network.
Problem:
If you have a relatively small base or lets say a factory build where Request
and Provide
entities are placed in different rows (i.e. opposing sides of an Assembler), you can easily set one container to provide the contents back to the network and then copy&paste its entity settings to all other entitites of same type.
If you have a large factory or your item network containers with different order types are neighboring each other, you cannot quickly paste settings to all the entities and will have to do it meticulously one by one, oftentimes wasting minutes on this pointless and mundane excercise.
Idea:
When dismantling a container entity, automatically push its contents to the item network (even if its done by construction robots).
If this is for some reason not possible as per game logic, provide an additional type of entity order to feed back all contents to the item network, preferably instantaneously, skipping the usual processing queue.
The basic motivation behind this idea is the inconvenient fact, that sooner or later you will have to dismantle (and probably rebuild elsewhere) large parts of your factory.