Issue using string based category attributes

Mark_John

I am experiencing 2 issues if anyone has any comments/assistance...

Using Content Web Services I am attempting to create a document with one or more categories, where some of the attributes of each category are not used (and defined as not required).

Firstly I am seeing that StringValue based category attributes are displaying in the CS front-end without the associated data-entry box when the document and metadata are saved.

To get around this, I have to initialise each StringValue attribute to an empty string, which seems strange. (see code snippet below)

Secondly, when initialising each StringValue based category attribute, an error of  "One or more invalid values for attribute {attribute} were provided." is thrown upon document creation where the attribute is defined as a "Table Key Lookup". This is the same even if an entry is added to the lookup with an empty string ("") or space (" ").

Has anyone else expreienced this or know of a workaround or fix...?

These issues are being experienced using CS 10.5 .Net Web Services where CS is using Oracle as it's RDBMS.

metadataCategory = clientBlock.documentManagementClient.GetAttributeGroupTemplate(ref clientBlock.docAuth, "Category", systemCategories.FirstOrDefault(c => c.DisplayName == categoryName).Key);

string fieldType = null;

for (int attributeCount = 0; attributeCount < metadataCategory.Values.Length; attributeCount++)

{

fieldType = metadataCategory.Values[attributeCount].GetType().ToString();

fieldType = fieldType.Substring(fieldType.LastIndexOf(".") + 1);

if (fieldType == "StringValue")

{

ContentServerConnectorNS.DocumentManagement.StringValue stringValue = metadataCategory.Values[attributeCount] as ContentServerConnectorNS.DocumentManagement.StringValue;

stringValue.Values = new string[] { "" };

}

}

sıɹɥɔ

Hi Mark,

As you point out a Text attribute is shown in a browser as a data-entry box i.e. as a typical form. Note that an end-user, in populating this field, does not have a way to distinguish "missing value" from a zero-length value; they can only provide the latter. This just happens to be the opposite of a Popup attribute, for which a pull-down menu is shown. It contains a choice labelled "<None>" allowing the user to choose "missing value", different than a zero-length value.

These user interfaces imply the choices available to the underlying datatypes, and a developer will need to keep these in mind. In obtaining the template for an attribute you should automatically be getting the proper default values defined for the attribute. It's only when you want to explicitly change the values that you need to be aware of what's allowed e.g. a zero-length string vs. a missing value (aka "null").

 

Hope this helps,

-chris