8.8

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 in OL Connect tasks
Although the metadata file created and maintained by OL Connect tasks looks the same as the
metadata file produced by other tasks, it is in fact different: it contains less information. Only the
first three levels in the metadata hold information about the job: Job, Group and Document. A
Group has information about a record set and a Document about one record. Datapage and
Page nodes are visible in the Metadata file, but in this case they don't contain any actual job
related information.
Taking this limitation into account, the Metadata related plugins (see "Metadata Tasks" on
page509) can be used in conjunction with OL Connect tasks nonetheless.
PlanetPress 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:
l The job contains only invoices for clients located in Montreal.
l Since more than one invoice can go to the same recipient, invoices are grouped by
customer.
l Each invoice is a document resulting from the execution of a PlanetPress Design
document over one or more datapages, which results in zero or more physical pages
being output.
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