Understanding Metadata Properties and Values

Metadata can be complicated.

So far this help text has described how to create and edit metadata groups, properties and values, and not gone into detail about how or why metadata is used.

Where metadata is used by your website, template, or other GOSS product, the best explanation of how it should be used will be found in the documentation for that product.

This article provides additional information about how metadata values, and the content using them, are indexed by the iCM search.

Metadata and Search

Both metadata groups and metadata properties let you enter a value for "search field". This search field is used as the name of a new property in the content item that uses metadata values of that group or property. That is, it appears in the search entry for the article or media that uses the value.

That's a pretty tricky concept to explain, but hopefully an example will help.

Schemas and synonyms are also indexed. The example below includes a schema, schema ID, local term and known term.

The Group and Property

For this example a group and a property have been given a search field value. Normally you'd just use the one.

Note how the icon in the explorer tree includes a magnifying glass icon to show that the search field has been added.

The Value

This is the only value of the property created above. It includes schema information and synonyms. The value has an ID of 7 (generated when the value was created).

It has been related to an article. Note how it is formatted "property=value"

The Search Entry

This is how the metadata value above has been indexed. The value, description, local term, schema, schema ID and known term have all been included, and can be searched upon.

{
    "custom1": "4,7,1",
    "custom2": "My Schema,1",
    "keyid": "7",
    "nkeyid": 7,
    "groupkey": "Metadata7",
    "keytype": "Metadata",
    "metadata": "",
    "parentdata": "4,7,1",
    "summary": "Search Field Example Value Search Field Example Value My Schema 1 A known term A local synonym",
    "title": "Search Field Example Property : Search Field Example Value",
    "id": "Metadata7",
    "securitydata": "0",
    "OBJECT_C__title": "Search Field Example Property : Search Field Example Value"
}When related to an article, the search entry for the article is indexed like this.

{
    "custom1": ",40,9,1,0",
    "custom2": "7",
    "custom3": "1",
    "keyid": "40",
    "nkeyid": 40,
    "groupkey": "Article40",
    "keytype": "Article",
    "metadata": "7",
    "parentdata": ",40,9,1,0",
    "summary": "Here's the article intro text. Here's the article Body Text ",
    "title": "A new article",
    "id": "Article40",
    "creationdate": "2017-03-29T14:09:21.863Z",
    "modificationdate": "2017-04-28T08:14:39.887Z",
    "displaystartdate": "2015-05-07T10:23:09Z",
    "displayenddate": "2115-10-11T17:00:00Z",
    "securitydata": "0",
    "OBJECT_C__title": "A new article",
    "OBJECT_SF_SEARCHFIELDEXAMPLEPROPERTY": "Search Field Example Value",
    "OBJECT_SF_SEARCHFIELDEXAMPLEGROUP": "Search Field Example Value"
}Note how the article entry includes two extra properties, one for the metadata group and one for the property, which include the name of the search field (the last two lines).

If the metadata group and property did not have a search field, these lines would not be present.