8.7

Metadata
Metadata is a hierarchical structure describing a job. Simply put, metadata is data about data
or, in other words, information tagged to data. Metadata includes information about the data file
itself, the document, custom user fields and in some cases page properties and page counts.
PReS Workflow provides a whole series of plugins to create and edit Metadata within
processes (see Metadata Tasks).
Note
Applications or plugins created in PlanetPress Suite 6 and using metadata will need to
be updated for use in version 8.7.1. No backward compatibility mode is available.
Warning
When a user-defined emulation is used with metadata, results and behavior are unknown
and unsupported. For instance, refreshing the metadata file may cause the document to
crash and/or corrupt. For this reason, it is strongly advised to create backup copies of
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:
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