How to store structured metadata

Hi all!

I have read a lot of papers about single and repeated attributes and custom types and aspects. I haven't found a solution to store complex structured metadata. For example, i would like to store the following metadata:

Document

Name (Single)
Signers (Repeated)
- Name (Single)
- Last Name (Single)
- Email (Single)
- Telephone numbers (Repeated)
  - Mobile Number
  - Phone Number

What I don't know is if there is any way to store inside repeated attributes, complex attributes such as a Signer information. I haven't found anything about ir. Firstly I thought in the use of aspects, but I have read that there is no way to attached two aspects of the same type to the same document.

I would be very grateful if someone could help me.

Thank you very much

Javier Martinez

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Comments

bacham2

No you can't store directly complex data, unless you want to store XML fragments directly in an attribute. You may want to look at XML Applications. It allows you to define rules for how to split up an XML file into multiple related objects, and how to map attributes to these. XML Applications are a feature of DFC.

Hicham

DCTM_Guru

In your have licensed XML store for Content Server, you might be able to do all of this as XML.

javinott

Thank you for your responses. Last week I was looking for a solution and I was told to define sysobjects subtypes, and create objects without content and relate them to the ones that have content. I would be able to do this by means of relationships between objects or with the use of ID attributes. Do you think is a correct solution?

DCTM_Guru

You can definitely do it using relationships and sysobjects, but you would have to create the code to manage all of this (ie CRUD operations).

javinott

Thank you Johnny,

I have one more question. Which one is the best option if we want to make searches in related sys_objects? For example, if I wanted to find a document signed by a signer called "Javier". It would be better to use relationships between Document and Signers or to define a DM_ID repetitive attribute "signer"?

Thank you very much

DCTM_Guru

Creating a custom DM_ID attribute will only store ID of the user. You will still have to JOIN to get the signer name. dm_relation objects requires subsequent JOIN to get the info, but you dont have to worry about creating foreign keys and management of them. You can define dm_relation_type such that if the primary object is deleted, perform a cascading deleting on the related object.