8.6

your documents beforehand.
Metadata structure
The hierarchical structure of the metadata is composed of a number of basic levels for adding
information to the job. These levels are, from top to bottom:
l
Job: a file that contains 1 or more groups.
l
Group: a logical and ordered group of documents (ex: all invoices for a specific customer
number; all documents going to the same address, etc.).
l
Document: group of 1 or more ordered datapages intended to the same recipient from the
same source (ex: invoice).
l
Datapage: 1 atomic unit of content that produces zero, one or more pages.
l
Page: 1 side of a physical paper sheet.
When Metadata is produced for a given job, a hierarchical (i.e. tree-like) structure is created,
composed of the above elements in the following order: Job > Group(s) > Document(s) >
Datapage(s) > Page(s). Any operation that modifies the data with regards to the structure (ex:
remove pages, alter the data, etc.) makes the metadata obsolete and so it must be recreated or
refreshed.
Metadata structure in PlanetPress Workflow
Although visually the same when viewed in Workflow, metadata are defined differently in
[[[Undefined variable Old_ProductVar.ProductShort]]] and PlanetPress Workflow. In metadata
created for a PlanetPress Workflow job, only the first three levels contain information about the
job: Job, Group and Document. A Group contains information about a record set and a
Document contains information about one record. Datapage and Page nodes are visible in the
metadata, but in this case they don't contain any actual job related information.
[[[Undefined variable Old_ProductVar.ProductShort]]] Design example
As an example, consider the typical case of a PlanetPress Design document which uses a Line
Printer data file of transactional data in order to generate PDF invoices for a series of clients. By
using the Metadata tools available in PlanetPress Workflow, the following information can be
added to the data file:
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