Customise metadata screen

Mr_Cruise

Dear All,

We currently use MediaBin in a classic way where you upload your images into Mediabin and then reference them from TeamSite DCR’s.

We have new project where they want to utilise the metadata that is set in MediaBin. Ideally the metadata that is set against an image in Mediabin would be pulled from a database. For example an image will fall into a particular category, which is defined in a database, the categories would then appear in a drop-down list.

I don’t think there is a way to do this but is there another way to set the extended attributes? Maybe build a custom interface

Thanks in advance.

Lee

cliff1

Hi Lee,

Can you provide a little more detail on what you are looking for? When I read the post, two separate things come to mind:

1. Have ECM Connector dialog navigate by a metadata field (perhaps something like "category") to make it easier for the end user to find the appropriate asset.

2. When a file (rendition) is imported from MB to TS, grab some of the MB asset metadata so that it can be used in TeamSite.

#2 is already supported. When you import a rendition, the TS file has several EAs that start with "MediaBin/". One of these is MediaBin/Metadata and contains an XML record with much of the metadata from mediabin.

We don't have a good solution for #1. The search feature in the browse dialog queries metadata, but it won't be targeted to a specific metadata field.

The entire ecmconnector in TeamSite is written against the MB SOAP api, so you can certainly do your own solution as a replacement. We don't expose the existing code for extension, so it would be a ground-up replacement which is quite a bit of work.

One last thought that might be crazy: In TeamSite 6.7.1 SP1 we added the ability to declare a ceiling directory in a DCT. I'm not familiar with all of the MB capabilities, but if you can define folders based on metadata query constraints (virtuall folder that matches a query), you could create a couple based on the most common query criteria and set the ceiling directory in the DCT to take the user to the "metadata" driven folder structure. Hopefully someone on this forum can reject this idea if MB does not support metadata driven folders (sorry for lack of MB knowledge in this area).

-Cliff