Setting metadata for all files in a workarea

Hi,
Is there a way to set metadata for all files in a particular workarea using a custom menu item?

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Yes - but be sure you know what you're attempting to do: If you set metadata on *all* files in a workarea - and then submit them - that metadata will exist on *all* files in *all* workareas once other workareas are updated from the staging area.

Do you really mean *all* files - or just *selected* files?
Is the intent that you want this metadata to be persistent across workareas, staging, editions - or are you trying to do something that only exists within the workarea?

As for implementation - you create a CGI script in IWHOME/httpd/iw-bin/ that uses the CLT iwextattr - the rest is pretty basic programming. If you're not up to the task, hire a technical consultant.

--fish
(Interwoven Senior Technical Consultant)

JvdW

ghoti,
In our setup we only have one workarea per branch, so we never update workareas from staging. And by all files I mean all html files which exist inside the current workarea.
I know how to create a CGI script to do this, but isn't there a way to use the existing iwmetadata.cgi?
We DO want to use the metadatarules from the datacapture.cfg and the CGI mentioned above allready does this validation. The only trouble with it is that you must select files in the workarea for the CGI to work.
Do you see my problem?
best regards,
JvdW

james1

You could start a workflow job, add every file in the workarea to it, and then have the job transition to a cgitask using iwmetadata.cgi. When iwmetadata.cgi is used as a cgitask, it operates over all files attached to the job.

Note that if you have a lot of files, the metadata CGI might be slow. I don't know what performance testing has been done on it, but I would guess that thousands of files would be pretty slow.

You will almost definitely get better performance by writing a script that runs the "iwextattr" CLT over every file, but, as you noted, there are some drawbacks to this approach.

Hope this helps.
-- James

--
James H Koh
Interwoven Engineering